


Growing Pains

by moolktea



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Angst, Dadgil, Family Dynamics, Fluff, Gen, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Panic Attacks, nero propaganda, post-dmc3 AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-05-13 04:44:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 47,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19244092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moolktea/pseuds/moolktea
Summary: It takes a village to raise a child, or so the saying goes. Unfortunately, Dante's only got one vaguely reformed homicidal twin brother on his side, and about nineteen years of life experience to figure things out, so when a mute, fluffy-haired, and absolutely tiny runaway kid shows up at his doorstep, Dante thinks he might be screwed.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> HSDFHSDH happy father's DAY....i giv the gift of floofy and angelic baby nero + dante and vergil's horrendous 19 year old teen-foster-dad parenting  
> (Post DMC3 AU in which Vergil didn't fall into Hell, and Dante and Vergil accidentally find themselves raising a baby Nero.)  
> chapter number subject to change as always

Life at nineteen years old certainly isn’t how Dante imagined it, when he was a kid.

He’d thought he’d still have his parents, for one. And he certainly didn’t expect to turn out to be a half-demon, running a business around the sole purpose of killing other demons. He probably should have expected the silent treatment from his brother, though--Vergil was always good at that kind of thing when they were eight years old.

In the two weeks since Dante forcibly prevented his brother’s highly irrational plans to take up a permanent residence in Hell and dragged him back to his shop, Vergil has refused to even acknowledge his presence. They might as well not be living in the same place, for all intents and purposes. 

Whenever Dante walks into a room, Vergil walks out. He spends all of his time locked up in one of the spare rooms that Dante has, probably polishing his Yamato, and not in the fun way. He’s not sure what his brother is eating, but he either waits until Dante is asleep or is just performing some bizarre sort of photosynthesis. Dante wouldn’t exactly put it past Vergil to have become half-plant along with everything else--Vergil probably would have thought the pink carnations outside held some mystical unheard of power. 

Overall, if Dante had to summarize his current relationship with his brother, he’d probably go with “bad,” or one of those other negative adjectives. 

Not for lack of trying on Dante’s part, though. He’s attempted again and again to reason with Vergil, or at least get him to speak to him, but Vergil seems pretty convinced that Dante was completely intent on absolutely ruining his entire life by stopping him from going to Hell. As miserable as Vergil seems now, Dante can’t help but wonder if his brother actually  _ would  _ be happier in the demon world.

It’s not a thought he lets himself linger on for very long, though, because the idea of allowing his last remaining relative to more or less throw his life away doesn’t sit very well Dante.

Lady thinks he’s made a mistake, and certainly isn’t shy about saying it. She’d dropped by about once, and when the meeting had ended in a rather disastrous set of bullet holes in Vergil’s door, Dante had decided it was probably best to allow both his brother and her to cool off a bit before inviting her over again. She’s just looking out for his well-being, or so she’d said somewhere in the middle of her exasperated hissing,  _ Vergil stabbed you in the chest, Vergil tried to kill you, Vergil would sell your soul to Arkham for a single pizza slice, don’t you remember, Dante? _

He doesn’t deny any of that--but somehow, as off-putting as Vergil’s continuous attempts at fratricide should be, they really aren’t. Vergil is still his twin brother, and Dante can’t bring himself to give up on him, no matter what he does.

He’s in the middle of contemplating his early-life crisis when an unexpected visitor drops by.

Dante’s always getting surprise customers in his shop, so people showing up at his door is nothing new. What  _ is  _ new is that his latest walk-in can’t even see over the edge of the desk with how short he is, drowning in what looks like an overly-large hospital gown, his wide blue eyes peeking out from underneath white bangs.

Great. Someone’s kid has gotten lost.

“Uh. Can I help you?” Dante decides to indulge the child, a grin playing at his lips as he leans over the edge of the desk.

The boy stares up at him wordlessly, before twisting around to look at the still open door, and Dante gets the vague impression that the kid is trying to show him something.

“What? You got a friend out there? Someone who needs my help?”

There’s a long pause, where the boy tilts his head in an admittedly endearing way, before quickly nodding. Dante is a little creeped out by the complete lack of expression on the kid’s face, but he decides to humor his “customer” anyway. It’s not like he has anything better to do, aside from obsessing over Vergil, and if someone really does need his help, Dante doesn’t want to take any chances.

“Sure, then. You stay here, I guess.”

With a grunt, he gets to his feet and runs his hand through his hair, flicking up the collar of his red jacket. He grabs Rebellion on his way out, just in case there’s a particularly nasty surprise waiting for him outside. Behind him, the kid obediently watches as he lazily trudges out the door, surveying the area.

To his non-existent surprise, there’s nothing there. The weird kid’s probably got an imaginary friend or something, or is just lost and looking for someone to find his parents. Dante’s not sure how much he can help with that, unless the boy’s parents are demons or pizza delivery people.

“Sorry kid. Looks like your friend ran off,” he informs the boy as he comes back in, and he receives another one of those wide-eyed stares in return as the kid hugs himself and seems to shrink.

After another moment of silence, he nods again, before turning around and slowly starting to limp out the door, perhaps going off to search for his parents in another location or go buy his imaginary friend some chicken nuggets.

Whatever.

It’s none of Dante’s business, anyway. 

He lounges back in his chair, propping his feet up on his desk and laying his head back, staring up at the ceiling. His five-second stroll outdoors has left him awfully hungry, and he thinks he deserves another pizza for putting up with his brother’s shit and playing nice with some pre-schooler. With another glance at the locked door where Vergil’s still holed himself up, Dante angles his head to inspect his desk in an idle sort of contemplation.

Maybe if he gets pizza, Vergil will come out, drawn by the impossible, irresistible temptation that pizza is. It’s a futile hope, but at this point, Dante is willing to keep trying the same things over and over again if it means that Vergil might speak to him.

There’s a bit of a problem, though.

When Dante pulls open his desk drawer and rifles around to find his bag of spare coins, oddly enough, he can’t seem to locate it. He stares down at the messy contents of the drawer for about ten seconds before he looks up, to where the door of his office is still ajar, and the pieces slowly start to click together in his mind.

Oh,  _ fuck _ no. The brat had to be about six years old, at the very most. Dante’s a nineteen-year-old devil hunter who’s seen more in his one lifetime than most people could in twenty, there’s no fucking way he just got  _ robbed _ by a child.

Dante thinks of the way the kid had stared so blankly up at him, how he’d been wrapping his arms around himself so tightly, like he was clutching something to his chest, his head tilted in that innocent manner.

That little  _ shit. _

“I’m going out, Verge!” Dante shouts at his brother’s door as he practically leaps over his desk. He’s not entirely sure his brother will care at all, but he supposed it’s best to let him know, just in case Dante ends up chasing after this brat for longer than expected. Not likely, considering Dante’s superhuman speed and reflexes. 

The second he bursts out the door, he can already see the kid’s tiny figure, holding Dante’s bag of coins in his both of his hands and staring into the contents. Slowly, the kid sets the bag on the ground and reaches into it, like he’s trying to count the amount. Dante almost wants to laugh—the brat is an amateur, for sure. No thief worth their salt stuck around the scene of the crime to examine their earnings.

This’ll be easier than he thought.

The instant the amused chuckle escapes him, the kid instantly looks up, freezing in place like a startled rabbit. Dante raises a brow—lucky coincidence for the kid. There’s no way he could have heard Dante, not through the bustling noise of the thirty or so people on this street.

Dante starts forward, taking a single step towards the boy.

Abruptly, in a motion faster than Dante would have expected, the kid snatches up the bag again and instantly bolts, leaping on top of a stack of crates taller than his entire body and vaulting himself onto one of the lower-hanging roofs. 

The kid’s got a few tricks up his overly-long sleeves, Dante will give him credit for that. But if he thinks he’s getting away with just that, then he’s sadly mistaken. 

Dante grins, cracking the muscles in his neck as he tilts his head to the side, before leaping forward and easily following the kid’s path. By the time he gets to the top of the roof, he can see the boy starting to scramble away a good hundred meters from him, surprisingly deft at keeping his balance, even while holding onto a bag of coins that had to be heavier than he was. 

The boy twists his head around, looking startled to see that Dante has managed to follow him up here, and Dante moves forward, extending a hand towards him.

“You’re pretty fast, I’ll give you that. But you gotta know, stealing is a crime. Return that to me, and I’ll let you go.”

The brat still says nothing in response. Either the kid’s just like Vergil and is actively attempting to ignore him, or he just doesn’t talk at all. From the way the boy glares defiantly at him, Dante is guessing that it’s the latter. He lifts his tiny head up in a silent challenge, his eyes bright behind his bangs, before turning around and dashing off again.

Dante’s impressed. The boy’s got more guts in him than most of the demons that Dante’s killed, especially considering the painfully obvious differences in their builds. Hell, the kid doesn’t even have  _ shoes,  _ and he’s still willing to try and outrun Dante. 

He follows after the boy, who moves fast enough to force Dante into an actual sprint, and lets the kid take him on a little adventure through the city. It becomes increasingly obvious as they go along that the boy is unfamiliar with the territory, as he leads Dante in circles several times, and appears to just be taking whatever corner or turn he thinks will help him lose Dante the fastest. 

Maybe it’s awfully shallow of Dante, but he’s honestly having more fun than he’s had in months, chasing this child all over the place, leaping over crates and unfinished construction and dodging between the narrow alleyways. He knows it’ll come to its natural end, anyway, because the kid’s lack of knowledge of the area is about to screw him over. Dante knows exactly where the boy is about to run into, a dead end at the edge of the docks.

Sure enough, a minute later, the kid’s bare feet scrape against the cement edge of the building they’re standing on, one that overlooks the water. He stares down into the ocean beneath him, before looking around himself for some other avenue of escape. Dante chuckles breathlessly as he comes closer, following the frantic motion of the other’s eyes, watching him calculate the distance on either side of Dante.

As far as he can tell, the kid definitely doesn’t know how to swim, and even as tiny as he is, Dante doesn’t think he stands a shot at slipping past Dante. The boy seems to realize this too, because he hugs the bag more closely to his chest and tenses up, clearly preparing himself for a fight.

“Hey, I’m not mad, I just want my money back,” Dante says as he steps forward, but the boy immediately squeezes his eyes shut and flinches away.

Unfortunately, in his panic, he seems to have forgotten that he’s standing right on the edge of the building, and he topples backward, his flailing arms releasing Dante’s bag of coins before they can go with him, too. The kid doesn’t even scream as he falls off the edge, his tiny body falling a good distance down before he hits the water. Dante immediately snatches the bag out of the air and looks down, just in time to see the boy’s head disappear underneath the water.

Shit.

Without a second thought, Dante strips off his own coat and tosses it next to him, along with his possessions, reminding himself to come back for them later, once this mess is dealt with. Then he jumps into the water himself, the icy chill of the ocean stinging against his skin as he ducks his head underneath and looks for the kid.

The brat already isn’t moving, completely limp and still, and Dante wraps an arm around his tiny waist, hauling him upwards and dragging them both onto the wet concrete of the docks. He waves off the extremely concerned bystanders who are crowding the scene, laying the kid out on the ground.

“Hey—hey kid, you alive?” Dante asks, and on further inspection, he can see that the kid is very much breathing and alive. His eyes are open, in fact, but he seems to be staring blankly up at nothing, still completely unmoving except for the occasional shudder that wracks his body. 

Dante, both disturbed and worried by the kid’s unresponsiveness, slowly reaches out and touches the boy’s shoulder. 

The kid immediately seizes up, throwing his hands over his face and curling up into a ball, his breaths erupting into shallow pants, fast enough to resemble hyperventilation, and Dante has absolutely no fucking clue what he’s supposed to do. He isn’t sure of  _ anything,  _ actually, except that this is somehow completely his fault.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says again helplessly, and he really doesn’t think that touching the boy again is a good idea anymore, judging from his reaction.

But people are starting to gather again, they’ve caused enough of a scene with their little diving routine, and the sight of a two-hundred pound, half-naked male crouched over a panicking child is certainly not a reassuring sight for anyone. 

With a grimace and a quiet apology to the boy, he puts his hands underneath the other and scoops him up into his arms, trying to give his best and most charming smile to the onlookers.

“He just doesn’t like water, is all,” he attempts to explain them away, starting to edge back towards some isolated alleyway so he can retrieve his possessions and bring this kid back to the shop so he can figure out what to do with him.

“He’ll be okay soon.”

He isn’t too sure about that, not with the way he’s starting to feel the boy silently sob into his shoulder, shaking so hard that Dante’s afraid he might drop him. Throughout the whole thing, he makes absolutely no noise, not even a hiccup or a tiny gasp, which feels like the worst part of all of this. He’s never known a kid to be as quiet as this one before, and unless the boy just actually has no voice, something is very wrong. 

Somehow, Dante manages to retrieve his shit and get the two of them back to the shop without further incident, and he feels his feet squish wetly in his boots as he tracks seawater all over the floor. He pays little attention to the mess he’s making as he goes along, dumping his stuff back in their proper positions.

He has bigger concerns, anyway.

“I have to get you out of these wet...clothes. You’ll get sick otherwise,” he tries as he sets the kid down in one of the chairs, looking dubiously at the incredibly thin hospital gown still clinging to his fragile frame. The thing wasn’t doing a very good job of protecting the kid in the first place, but the boy immediately wraps it tighter around himself, shying away from Dante’s touch.

“Come on, please? You’re a smart kid—you have to know it’s not good for you.”

Dante reaches forward again, but the boy immediately starts shaking his head, screwing his eyes shut and curling up into the chair, his breath starting to come in fast and shallow pants, and Dante’s seriously worried that he’s going to faint.

“Yo, Verge!” He snaps through clenched teeth, knowing his call won’t be answered. “Really need some fucking help in here right about now!”

He turns his attention back to the kid, his hands hovering uncertainly over the other before he lowers them. Anything that he does is the wrong move, evidently, and he’s really not equipped for a situation like this. Dante is starting to get cold, too, and his still wet clothes are sticking unpleasantly to his skin, but up and leaving the kid here, even for a moment, feels like a remarkably shitty thing to do. 

In vain, he struggles to recall what his mother used to do to calm him down after a particularly bad nightmare or when he was especially upset, but this doesn’t look like an average tantrum. The boy is displaying a level of instinctual terror that someone his age shouldn’t even  _ know.  _

“It’s okay, kid, just...just calm down. Do you want a glass of water or something?” Dante hopelessly suggests, but the kid’s only response is another full-body shudder as he covers his hands with his face and flinches backward, his breaths still coming in those awful, silent frantic gasps. 

Dante winces at the kid’s obviously worsening condition, kneeling in front of the boy in an attempt to make himself look marginally less intimidating, but the kid isn’t even looking at him.

“Shit, sorry--fuck.”

What the hell is he supposed to do? Does he call a doctor? Does he find this kid’s parents? Does this kid even  _ have  _ parents?

“What have you done now, Dante?”

Dante nearly jumps at the sound of his brother’s voice, raspy and hoarse from disuse, and he’s so surprised to see his brother out of the room at all, actually speaking a full sentence to him, that his mind goes temporarily blank. Vergil gives him a flat sort of stare before stalking forward, roughly nudging Dante out of the way to kneel in front of the kid.

“Wait, Verge--” Dante starts, because having his murderous, power-hungry twin brother interact with a sobbing, terrified child is probably a worse idea than putting olives on a pizza.

Vergil largely ignores him, instead reaching out and grabbing both of the kid’s shoulders. The boy jerks underneath his touch, looking up at him with wide eyes, slowly lowering his hands from his face and bringing them uncertainly towards his chest.

“You are panicking,” his brother informs the boy, in a calm, neutral sort of tone that carries just enough weight in it to cause the kid’s breath to hitch in a silent pause. 

“A highly irrational, human feeling, but a natural feeling nonetheless. And it will eventually pass.”

Vergil’s expression doesn’t change in the slightest, but Dante sees the way he exhales slowly, in a much deeper motion than usual, his grip on the kid slowly loosening, along with the rest of his muscles. The kid, who hasn’t stopped staring at Vergil, mirrors the same movement, his panicked, quick breathing gradually beginning to even out as he unconsciously uses Vergil as a reference.

His brother carefully removes one of his hands from the kid’s shoulders and glances sideways at Dante, motioning towards him with a tilt of his head. The boy’s gaze instantly follows the motion, and Dante momentarily flounders in place, wondering what the hell Vergil is expecting him to do.

“That’s a truly awful choice of clothing that he’s wearing, isn’t it?” Vergil asks the kid, and both pairs of eyes scrutinize the belt still over Dante’s chest.

Dante isn’t a shy person by any means, but the incredibly judgmental look in Vergil’s eyes has him violently shoving down the urge to put his coat back on and maybe punch his brother in the face.

“It’s easier than wearing a shirt,” Dante grumbles in mild protest, but Vergil’s attention has returned to the kid, who isn’t quite hyperventilating anymore, and is instead staring hard at Dante with an unusual amount of focus, like he’s studying every part of him and describing it to himself in his mind. 

It seems like an effective distraction from the kid’s emotions though, and after about five minutes of further examination, the boy inhales shakily and slowly uncurls from his little ball, properly sitting up and looking between the both of them. He bites his lip as he gazes at Vergil, then shyly ducks his head and wipes at his nose with a hand.

His way of saying thank you, maybe. 

Vergil doesn’t quite smile, but Dante, who knows his twin brother better than anyone else still alive in the world, can clearly see the way that his entire face softens. 

With his job evidently completed, Vergil stands up and abruptly turns away.

“Hey, wait--” Dante reaches out and grabs his brother’s arm, because this is the first time that Vergil has allowed himself to be seen in about two weeks, and he isn’t about to pass up this opportunity to at least attempt a conversation with him again.

He half expects Vergil to go for round three and slice his hand off with Yamato, or at the very least push him off and disappear for another two months of winter like some sort of half-demon groundhog, but Vergil stops where he is, tilting his head in silent indication for Dante to go on.

There’s a lot that Dante wants to say, actually, and too many questions to fit in the minuscule space of time that he suspects Vergil has allotted for him.

“How did you know to do that? With the kid, I mean?”

Vergil tenses underneath his hand, but actually answers the question, which is already a big enough shock to Dante.

“The method has proven itself effective in the past, when needed.” 

When  _ he  _ needed it.

Dante has a sudden, uncomfortable image of his brother in the same position as the kid had been, curled up and unable to keep hold of his own emotions. He personally can’t reconcile it with the man standing in front of him now, but there’s still an eleven-year gap where his brother was a complete stranger to him. 

Answering the single question seems to have taxed Vergil’s patience with Dante to its limits, as his brother is already twisting away from his grip and starting to head back to the room off to the side.

“...thanks. For actually coming out,” Dante says to his turned back.

Vergil doesn’t pause this time as he rests his hand on the door.

“Well. You said you needed help.”

Then he shuts himself back inside the room, leaving Dante alone with a kid he still doesn’t know, a pile of very wet clothes, and a bizarrely warm, fuzzy feeling in his chest.

 

* * *

 

“So, you got a name, kid?” Dante asks when he gets back downstairs, having changed into a clean set of clothes and hung his beloved belt up to dry, effectively leaving him shirtless.

The kid is still dressed in his damp hospital gown-looking thing, and as shitty as Dante feels about that, he doesn’t want to push the kid to take it off again. Instead, he unfolds a towel he’d brought with him from his room and drapes it over the boy’s shoulders. 

He gets a confused look in return, but since the kid accepts the towel and wraps it more tightly around himself, Dante suspects that the boy’s reaction is probably more related to his question.

So the kid didn’t seem to know what a name was. Not a good indication of anything, really.

“I’m Dante,” he attempts to clarify. “Mr. Shut-in over there is Vergil. And you are…?”

A wary sort of recognition crosses the kid’s face as he slowly nods. Then, without taking his eyes off of Dante, the kid hooks his fingers around the too large collar of what he’s wearing and tugs it downwards, exposing what looks like tattoo on the left side of his neck.

“...Nero?” Dante squints as he tries to make out the lettering. He gets an even more confused look for his efforts, and, on a second glance, Dante realizes that what he mistook for a name is actually more like an incoherent sequence of letters and numbers, printed right above a strange looking emblem that Dante doesn’t recognize.

“IV..3170?” 

In Dante’s defense, whoever put the tattoo on this kid apparently did a shit job, because the lettering is shaky and cramped and jagged in several places. What the hell a kid this age is doing with a tattoo, though, is an entirely different story. 

The boy nods when Dante reads off the letters and numbers before solemnly tugging his clothing back upwards, and Dante gets a sick sort of feeling in his stomach.

“You’re telling me that that’s what people call you?”

He gets another nod, which feels like a punch to the gut more than anything, because this alone says so many fucked up things about what’s happened to the kid. Combined with the way the boy constantly seems on the defensive, alert for any sign of danger, the way he flinches if Dante moves too close or too quickly, and his muteness, Dante is starting to get a rather unpleasant picture of whoever this kid was last with.

“Well, uh, no offense, but IV3...something—that’s not really a name. Mind if I just call you Nero instead? Not a bad name, when you think about it.”

He immediately gets the most wide-eyed, innocent look in response, like the kid can barely believe that he actually has a  _ name  _ now, and the boy reaches up to comb his fingers through his damp bangs, a pleased flush crossing his pale cheeks. He still doesn’t smile, but this is the happiest he’s seen the other look this entire time.

Nero it is, then. 

He has something to call the kid now, at least, which at least one step further in what is probably the right direction than they were before.

“Guess we should open up the can of worms and get it out of the way, huh?” Dante muses aloud, and Nero fidgets uncomfortably but doesn’t seem to visibly protest.

“You got parents?” 

And if so, Dante would certainly like to know where they were at this moment, so he could give them a good asskicking and buy this poor kid a damn ice cream cake. 

Nero bites at his lip, turning his eyes upwards like he’s actually having to think about the question, but eventually, he shakes his head. A tiny hand comes up to the side of his neck to rub at his tattoo again, a motion carrying a weight that Dante doesn’t quite understand.

“Okay, so you don’t talk. That’s all good. But, uh...do you know how to write?”

He reaches over his desk and rifles around in his drawers for a pen and paper, holding them out to the boy. Nero seems to at least recognize what they are and takes the pen in his left hand. Dante’s hopes are quickly extinguished when he sees the way that Nero stares blankly down at the paper, like he’s not entirely sure what to do with them.

“Seems like a no.”

Nero glances upwards, the guilt clear in his eyes, and Dante quickly backtracks, plucking the objects back out of the kid’s hands.

“Wait, shit--no, don’t feel bad!” 

Dante isn’t usually this easily caught off guard, but he can feel most of his composure slip away as Nero stares up at him with the saddest eyes he’s ever seen.

“Seriously, don’t worry about it. You can always learn, anyway. I was pretty terrible at it myself when I was your age. Actually, wait, how old even are you?”

Nero tilts his head for a moment before looking down at his hands, taking what is an entirely too-long moment before he finally extends a hand out, his tiny palm facing Dante.

“Five. You’re  _ five  _ years old?”

Nero looks less confident in his answer at Dante’s incredulous tone, but Dante is too busy doing mental gymnastics trying to figure out where the hell a five-year-old picked up a tattoo and the athletic skills needed to outrun him along the way.

Then he remembers the raw fear in the kid’s blue eyes when Dante had properly come closer to him, and he decides that he doesn’t need the details after all. Dante’s own parents had been pretty great, at least for the amount of time they’d been with him, but he’d be the first to admit that there were some fucked-up people out there in the world, and kids made for easy targets, especially ones as tiny as Nero.

“Alright. Fuck. So...either you’ve got nowhere to go, or you just don’t want to go back to where you came from, am I right?”

Nero obviously hesitates to respond, as if worried that Dante might try and bring him back to wherever he’d come from, but he shakily nods, shrinking in on himself again.

Dante is most definitely not letting this kid go back to whoever  _ branded  _ him like a fucking animal and probably beat the fear of everything into him. It’s a stupid decision--he’s nineteen years old, he can’t even take care of his own twin brother, and he hunts demons for a living, which has to be pretty unsafe for a five-year-old. 

But Dante knows too well what it’s like to feel completely alone in the world.

“Well, if you’re going to be staying here, you mind if I set up some ground rules?”

Nero blinks at him expressionlessly, which Dante takes to mean that no, he doesn’t mind at all. He feels weird, assuming so much responsibility when he’s the furthest thing from responsible at this stage in his life, but he doesn’t want this brat running around and causing undue amounts of trouble, even as well-behaved as he seems now.

“First, no more stealing. I know my shit looks shiny, but my stuff is mine. And other people might not be so quick to forgive you if you take things from them. Vergil especially. He gets real touchy about his things.”

The kid instantly drops his gaze downwards, ducking his head in a silent apology, and he looks so genuine that Dante can’t help but smile, instinctively reaching forward and placing his hand on top of the boy’s head. Nero’s damp hair is awfully fluffy underneath his touch, and he carefully ruffles the white locks, watching Nero closely for any kind of negative reaction.

Nero stiffens at first, but once he realizes that Dante isn’t trying to hurt him, he slowly leans into the touch, his cheeks pinkening slightly.

Fuck. Were all kids supposed to be this cute, or was his just special?

Not that Nero was his, as much as the boy strangely vaguely resembles both him and Vergil, with his strikingly white hair and blue eyes. There’s a tiny possibility, maybe, but somehow he doubts that Vergil was running around at fourteen creating little mini-me’s, especially since Dante himself had really only discovered sex a year or so ago.

He’s so distracted by the absurdly fluttery feeling in his heart that he doesn’t realize that Nero is still blinking expectantly at him.

“Oh. Right. Rule number two...actually, I’m gonna be honest with you, kid. I really got nothing. I don’t know. No biting people? I mean, personally, I’m not so sure that even Vergil can stick to that rule, so I don’t really feel like it’s fair to impose it on you.”

Nero turns his head to look at the closed door of Vergil’s room with wide eyes, and Dante imagines that he’s trying to match the calm, composed Vergil that Nero had in mind with the brother that Dante knows.

“Either way,” Dante continues. “I don’t have any kid-sized clothes, so...unless you want to be eating dinner in that soggy thing, then, uh...here.”

He holds out his beloved coat to Nero, who takes it with trembling, uncertain hands, holding the fabric close to his chest. 

“You can wear that for now. There’s a bathroom in the back, you can change there. Or I’ll just turn around. Works for me either way.”

Nero doesn’t move, so Dante takes the initiative and turns around, reaching for the phone. He has to order himself his long overdue pizza, anyway. He’s not too sure what the kid likes on pizza, but he can just pick the toppings he hates off, because Dante is willing to put up with a lot, but he certainly won’t sacrifice his pizza. 

Behind him, he hears the faint rustling of cloth, and he guesses that Nero is done by the time he hangs up the phone. Just in case, he very subtly tilts his head and glances at the kid out of the corner of his eye.

Nero’s put on the coat, but his small hands are struggling to figure out exactly how to zip the thing up, and cut of the cloth leaves most of the kid’s skin exposed.

It definitely isn’t a pretty sight.

Dante’s stomach twists unpleasantly at the sheer number of scars and still-visible, fresh-looking bruises covering Nero’s upper half, but probably the worst thing is the dark, blotted marks lining the kid’s thighs, far too close to the insides for comfort.

Fuck. Vergil’s right, sometimes--humans really can be worse than demons.

He turns his gaze firmly onto the wall again, to afford Nero the privacy he deserves, and forces the slow-burning fury building in his stomach to dissipate when he hears the faint noise of the zipper indicate that Nero is finally finished. 

Nero looked small before, but now that he’s wearing a coat belonging to a man three times his size, he’s practically microscopic. The sleeves hang almost comically off of his hands, and Nero struggles for a long moment in trying to push them up to a manageable length, eventually giving up after several failed attempts. When he waddles forward, the back of Dante’s coat drags on the floor behind him, and the kid looks a little distressed at this, twisting around to pick up the fabric and gently dusting it off, like he’s worried about Dante’s coat getting dirty.

“Don’t, uh...don’t worry about that, kid,” Dante tries to say, even though his throat feels painfully tight at how pure Nero is acting. 

“You’re just fine, trust me. Do you like pizza?”

Dante is quickly starting to learn that Nero’s head tilt indicates his absolute and utter confusion at a subject, and Dante feels like tilting his head himself, or maybe bursting into tears, because this kid has never had pizza, the best and only edible food on this godforsaken planet before?

“Well, you  _ will  _ like it. I promise, it’s great.” 

Vergil arrives when the pizza does, and Dante is starting to think Nero is some kind of unconscious miracle worker or good luck charm, because his brother actually makes eye contact with him as he stalks out of the room again, settling himself in the chair next to the kid. 

“You are sharing your pizza with him,” his brother states flatly, and Dante actually jerks in surprise being directly addressed by his twin for the second time in one day. 

“In that case, I assume he is staying here for the foreseeable future.”

Dante scrounges up a piece of scrap paper and lays it in front of Nero, placing the kid’s very slice of pizza on top of it, before grabbing one for himself.

“Pretty much. Guess I should have asked you first, but…” he mumbles around a mouthful of cheese and tomato, his voice trailing off near the end. 

“Hm.”

Vergil doesn’t seem too dissatisfied, though, casting his curious gaze down at Nero, who has managed to force the sleeves of Dante’s coat far down enough that his hands are at least free. With no small amount of effort, he picks up the slice in both of his hands, before looking between the two of them.

“Come on, kid. Try it.”

Nero still looks hesitant, though, and Dante knows that the kid has to be starving just from looking at how painfully thin he is. That, coupled with the fact that Nero had been trying to steal money from him implied that the kid hasn’t had a good meal in more than a couple of days. If he were Nero, he’d have eaten the entire pizza by himself by now. 

“Perhaps he just does not like--” Vergil begins, but is abruptly cut off when Nero puts his slice back down on the paper, gently wraps it up, and holds it out to him expectantly.

There’s a long moment of silence, in which Vergil obviously looks Nero over, examining the way his exposed collarbones poke painfully out against his skin, at how thin and unnaturally small for his age he is, then back at the slice of pizza that Nero apparently refuses to eat if Dante and Vergil aren’t already fed.

“...oh.”

Dante has never heard so much emotion packed inside a single syllable before, and Vergil looks incredibly touched as he takes the pizza slice from Nero. When Vergil accepts his little gift, Nero shyly ducks his head and immediately blinds the both of them with a tiny, uncertain little smile.

“Oh my  _ god,” _ Dante says, with great feeling, and Vergil appears to be faring no better, holding onto his pizza slice and staring down at Nero’s face with an expression akin to terrified confusion. 

Vergil’s gloved hand reaches up for his own chest, his fingers pressed against the left side of his body, and Dante suspects that Nero is displaying a particularly fluffy sort of power that his brother has never encountered before.

“You’re killing us, Nero.”

Dante pushes open the box again and takes out another slice for the kid, which he seems more accepting of now that both the twins have their own pieces. 

“His name is Nero?” Vergil’s voice is quiet and unusually soft as he unwraps his pizza. Dante honestly didn’t see his brother as much of a pizza person, but even Vergil has the common decency to know to at least pretend to appreciate his present when the kid is sitting right next to him.

“Uh...well, long story.” 

He tries to give Vergil a “it’s complicated, I’ll tell you later” sort of look, and his brother apparently understands, because he merely settles back into his chair and eats his dinner.

Nero, meanwhile, continues to be mystified by the food, turning the triangular piece around to examine it from all three sides. He takes what appears to be a deep breath before slowly leaning forward and nibbling at the very tip of the slice, evidently unaware of the fact that both Dante and Vergil are staring at him like a pair of vultures. 

“So? What do you think? You like it?”

The kid actually seems to have forgotten he was there, flinching slightly at the sound of his voice before hastily nodding, pulling the pizza a little closer to him like he’s afraid that it’ll get taken away from him, now that he’s admitted that he likes it. 

“Cool,” Dante grins, satisfied now that he’s properly introduced Nero to the greatest gift that life has to offer.

“You shouldn’t corrupt children,” Vergil bluntly informs him. “There are other, far superior foods to pizza.”

“Yeah? Like what? What the hell have you been eating all this time, Verge?”

Vergil remains suspiciously silent at the question, but Dante can see the way that his brother’s jaw clenches, in the way it always did when he was privately embarrassed by something.

A mystery for later, then.

“Anyway,” Vergil changes the topic in a horrifically unsubtle manner. “How did you come across this boy?”

“You’re awfully interested. You think he’s yours or something?”

Vergil could not look more offended if Dante had kicked him in the nuts, made a quip about his lack of power, and threw his shitty book of William Blake poetry into the ocean. 

“Absolutely not. He’s more likely to have spawned from you, anyway, judging from the vastly disproportionate amount of time that your pants remain unzipped for.” 

“Hey, he looks more like you.”

“Dante, we are identical twins.”

Huh. Well, Vergil’s definitely got him there. 

Dante tries not to think too hard about the fact that Vergil’s gone back to acknowledging the blood relation between them when he’d all but disowned him a couple of weeks ago, but the comment lodges itself into the back of Dante’s mind anyway, and fills him with an unnecessary amount of hope. 

“Anyway, the punk tried to steal my money. We went out for a little run together, got a little soggy along the way, and came back here. All good.”

All good except for Nero’s little panic attack, of course, but he isn’t about to bring that up again, and he sure hopes Vergil can employ enough tact to avoid it, as well.

“So he actually succeeded in robbing you?” Vergil raises an eyebrow, casting a glance at Nero, who quickly turns shy under the attention again, squirming in his chair.

“Hey, in my defense, I wasn’t about to be paranoid of a five year old kid. He walked into my shop and pretended like he needed my help and everything.”

“Impressive. Not only did you properly manage your resources to accomplish your goal, but you also have proven to Dante how truly powerless he is.”

Nero blushes underneath Vergil’s praise, while Dante flounders from the obvious backhand slap that his brother has just delivered to him. The kid is almost glowing from being complimented, and he looks so damn  _ happy  _ that Dante can’t bring himself to ruin the moment by sniping back at Vergil and putting his older twin in his place.

Instead, he resolves himself to sulkily eating his pizza, until he notices Nero watching him with an extremely concerned look on his face. 

“Huh? I’m fine, kid--” Dante starts to say, but, with great care in his movements, Nero plucks off the largest piece of pepperoni on his pizza and struggles to lean forward, delicately laying it on top of Dante’s slice.

With his hand now free, the kid moves slightly to the left, and pats the back of Dante’s hand with his own tiny one before shyly retreating backwards.

Dante likes pepperoni. It’s his favorite topping, in fact. There is absolutely no problem with having more pepperoni on his pizza. There is, however, a problem with the fact that, in the ten minutes or so they’ve been eating for, Nero has evidently observed him enough to be able to determine this, and chose to give him one in an attempt to cheer him up over something he wasn’t exactly sad about in the first place, and that problem is that Dante’s heart was most definitely not meant to take this much abuse in one day.

“I...thanks, kid,” he manages to choke out, hurriedly shoving the rest of the slice into his mouth before he can say or do something truly unbecoming.

Nero nods solemnly back at him, returning to nibbling on his crust. Above his head, Dante meets Vergil’s gaze, which is so soft that he almost doesn’t recognize his brother, and Dante savors this moment as best as he can, this murder-free, pseudo-family reunion, because he’s probably not getting another chance at it.

As soon as Nero finishes his pizza, he curls up in his chair and lets out a soundless yawn, his eyelids fluttering shut. He  _ is _ a kid, after all, and he’s been through entirely too much today. Still, Dante is dreading the moment that Nero properly drifts off, because as soon as he does, Vergil abruptly stands up, evidently unable to remain in the same room as Dante without the presence of the Nero-buffer in between them.

He wants to stop Vergil, really, but his brother has already pushed himself out of his comfort zone by appearing before him twice in one day, and Dante doesn’t want to risk driving him off forever. Still, Dante’s always had poor self control, and this one instance of getting to indulge in easy banter with his brother for the first time in eleven years has him desperately wanting more.

“Hey, Verge—you, uh…”

Vergil turns away, neatly wiping off his hands on a napkin and pushing the chair back in. 

“I doubt you can be trusted to look after the child alone. You’ll need help.”

He reaches out for Nero’s sleeping face, but evidently thinks better of it, tucking his hands into his pockets and stalking off, his implied promise hanging in the air between them.

“...you really are something special, huh?” Dante chuckles wryly after his brother has been gone for a few minutes. 

Nero shifts in his sleep, snuggling further into Dante’s jacket, his long bangs fluttering with his deep breaths. Dante shakes his head, bending down and carefully scooping the kid up into his arms, taking care to avoid waking him up prematurely. The kid is way too light to be even remotely healthy, but hopefully that’s something that they’ll change in the future. 

As he turns to bring the kid upstairs into a proper bed, the absurdness of the situation as a whole suddenly strikes him. He’s nineteen years old, and he and his brother are about to try and play the role of what is essentially a parent to this mute kid that they don’t even know, when their own parents have been gone for over a decade. He doesn’t know about Vergil, but after their home was destroyed, Dante didn’t exactly have the best parental figures growing up—those were pretty hard to find when he spent most of his time running wild on the streets in search of his next meal.

Dante’s certainly taken on a lot of big jobs, but this is by far the largest, a lifelong commitment that they might not be able to keep. 

Nero shifts in his arms, soundless even in his dreams, and his fluffy hair, still damp from his swim in the ocean, tickles against Dante’s neck. The boy is a warm presence against him, surprisingly grounding, and Dante is suddenly reminded of that unfamiliar, gentle look on his brother’s eyes, and the way that Nero had looked at both of them, with an infinite amount of undying trust that they hadn’t done anything to earn. 

He looks at the closed door of Vergil’s room again, noting the sliver of light peeking out from underneath the crack.

Maybe they’ll be alright after all, actually. 

They’re the twin sons of Sparda, tentatively working together and united on a common goal—what could go wrong? 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HSGHSH OK im sorry that the chapter count has increased so GROTESQUELY the floofy baby newo got out of hand it will definitely increase more  
> ty for all of ur nice comments and patience, baby nero LOVES U

Dante’s brain is really all kinds of fucked up. 

He did a good thing--lots of good things, in fact--he saved the world, he saved a kid, and he maybe saved his brother. So, really, Dante doesn’t think that it’s too much to ask for at least one pizza-laden dream at night, instead of the usual recurring nightmare.

His subconscious, of course, or whichever asshole part of his mind controls his dreams, has other plans for him.

Every night since he’d returned to the shop with Vergil in tow, he closes his eyes and sees the same thing. He sees himself standing back on that ledge, adrenaline still pumping through his veins from the aftermath of their fight as he returns Rebellion to his back. He’s won, and it’s finally over, he’s finally kicked Vergil’s ass and knocked some sense back into his head, and whatever comes next, they can deal with together.

“No one can have this, Dante. It belongs to a son of Sparda,” Vergil grits out, stumbling a pace backward, and Dante instinctively follows, closes the gap between them, but then the tip of Yamato is at his neck, a breath away from digging into his skin.

“Leave me and go, if you don’t want to be trapped in the demon world. I’m staying. This was our father’s home.”

 _No,_ Dante wants to say. _It wasn’t._

Their father’s home was with them, was with their mother and himself and Vergil, and he’d only left due to circumstances beyond even his own control. Dante’s certain of it now, having faced a fraction of the trials his father had went through in his life--he would have come back to them, if he was able to.

The demon world isn’t a home for any of them, least of all Vergil. His brother’s home is with him, and Dante’s going to _make_ him come home.

This is the part where his reality becomes a dream, because Vergil, as always, steps away from him, leaning his weight on the air as he tips backward, and Dante lunges forward by instinct. But this version of him isn’t fast enough to reach him, or isn’t strong enough to pull him up at all, or isn’t smart enough to know what Vergil was planning in the first place. That reason is different each time, but the outcome is the same. 

Vergil’s blade drags against his palm, blood and black fabric suspended in the air, and Dante is left staring at the form of his brother as it quickly disappears, swallowed up by the darkness below.

Dante clenches his fingers into a fist, feeling the cut rapidly burn against his skin, his heart pounding so hard in his chest he thinks he might vomit, and then there’s the slow, creeping realization of how _alone_ he now is, with the last of his bloodline forever gone, and Dante doesn’t think he can live like this, nineteen years old and left without a single anchor in the world, and maybe he should just throw himself into the pit as well, just so he won’t be alone.

His dream self moves before he can stop himself.

His eyes close, he steps off of the ledge, and Dante wakes up.

It takes too long to catch his breath again, as it always does, and he shakily raises his hand upwards, flipping his left palm over to stare at the unmarked skin. 

There’s a faint rustling from beside his head, and a very fluffy head of hair pokes out from underneath the covers, Nero apparently having woken up when he did. 

“Sorry, kid,” he grunts, taking in another trembling breath as he runs his hand through his own hair, trying not to look like a complete mess in front of the kid that he’s promised to take care of. 

“It’s nothing. You can go back to sleep.”

Nero bites down on his lip, dropping his gaze down to his own tiny hands, his baby blue eyes wide and innocent. He does not, in fact, return to sleep, instead reaching out for Dante’s left hand and holding it between both of his own, squeezing it lightly as he peeks up at Dante through his bangs.

He offers Dante a tiny smile before closing his eyes and bowing his head, going perfectly still. Dante blinks at him, his still sleep-muddled brain slowly putting the pieces together.

“Hang on—are you _praying_ for me?”

Nero doesn’t respond right away, evidently engrossed with his task of trying to pray some happiness into Dante, but once he’s done he looks up, nodding shyly, his pale cheeks flushing pink. He then stretches up as best as he can, having to stand on top of the bed on two very wobbly legs to reach the top of Dante’s head and offer him a kind, tiny head pat.

Oh _god._ Dante seriously wasn’t going to survive living with this kid if Nero kept being so pure. 

Dante himself doesn’t quite believe in God—and especially probably not whichever one Nero is praying to—but he certainly does feel better just from looking at this tiny kid. Despite everything shitty that’s happened to Nero, Nero seems absolutely intent on being the softest, kindest five year old in existence. 

He smiles softly down at him, running a gentle hand through Nero’s fluffy hair, and Nero shuts his eyes, flushing happily at the sensation. 

“Hey, thanks for trying. Feels better already, really,” he tells the kid. “What do you say we get you into some newer clothes and get you some breakfast?”

Nero nods at him, but from the way he looks down at Dante’s coat still around him and holds the fabric close to his chest, Dante gets the impression that he doesn’t want to part with it just yet. Dante can definitely get behind that sentiment--he’s pretty attached to his own coat, too, if he’s honest. 

Still…

He leans over to his drawer, rifling through the contents in search of a clean shirt for the kid to wear. All of them will hang off of him like a dress, and since Vergil is even taller than he is, with a similar build, borrowing his brother’s clothes would probably have even less satisfactory results. Still, Dante wasn’t exactly in the habit of keeping clothes meant for way-too-tiny five year olds around with him, and he certainly hopes that Vergil isn't either, so this is their best option.

Nero obediently takes the shirt from him when Dante hands it over and changes into it while Dante turns away, but he’s still hugging the coat like it’s a damn baby blanket, and Dante honestly doesn’t have the heart to turn him down or tug it away from him.

Well, maybe it was time that Dante started properly wearing shirts after all. He looks longingly at his beloved chest belt, but the stylistic effect isn’t quite the same without his coat, honestly, so he reluctantly pulls a short sleeved top over his head.

To his great surprise, by the time he comes down the stairs with Nero in his arms, he can actually see the turned back of his brother as Vergil stares intently at the microwave.

 _“Vergil?”_ he’s unable to help the incredulous tone that seeps into his voice, because he’d always thought of his brother as a nocturnal sort of vampiric slime mold, coming out only to feed in the rare hours of the night on substances of unknown quality.

Vergil very poorly stifles his startled jerk at the sound of Dante’s voice, his head whipping around to glare at him, only softening when he lays eyes on Nero, who had decided to keep wearing Dante’s coat over the new shirt he’d acquired. 

“Dante,” Vergil answers stiffly, unsubtly moving himself in front of the microwave and shoving something on the kitchen counter behind him and out of Dante’s range of vision.

Nero unwinds one of his tiny arms from Dante’s neck in order to give Vergil a truly enthusiastic wave, the too-long sleeve of Dante’s coat hanging off of his hand and flopping with the motion. Vergil stares blankly at the kid for a long moment, actually looking behind himself like he thinks Nero might be waving to someone else before nodding solemnly back at Nero.

“How did you sleep?” Vergil inquires, turning back around so quickly that Dante isn’t able to catch a glimpse of his facial expression, and he can hardly read anything off of the icy tone that Vergil graces him with.

_Well, I dreamt about you, and then failing to save you, so real amazing, really._

“Not bad. Kid cuddled up to me all night. Kind of like having a tiny teddy bear around.”

“Hm.”

With his twin’s body language so completely closed off, Dante can’t quite decipher if Vergil’s neutral-sounding noise means “good,” “bad,” or “I’m about to stab you in the chest and make a dick-shaped tower erupt from the earth,” but he supposes that if it’s the last option, it’s fairly considerate of Vergil to be doing it at breakfast.

Vergil doesn’t offer any more conversation, and Dante is a little preoccupied with getting Nero properly into a chair. The boy is so tiny that Dante actually has to stack a couple of couch cushions underneath him and help him into it for him to be able to actually see over the top of the table. 

The reminder of how light the kid is has him wondering what the hell he’s supposed to feed him. Sure, they still had leftover pizza in the fridge, and Dante definitely had no problem with settling down with a good slice or six first thing in the morning, but he was also a half-demon who metabolized everything he ate at a superhuman rate, and therefore none of the likely unhealthy  side effects that resulted from eating greasy cheese and tomato sauce every day had any chance of affecting his body.

Nero, on the other hand, is a five-year-old kid who, as far as Dante can see, is completely human. Dante doesn’t exactly have the best grasp on childcare and development, but he suspects that a tiny child like Nero, especially one who looks like he’s been starved for the better part of his life, probably needs a lot more nutrients outside of the ones that pizza provided. 

“Hey, Verge. Do you even remember what we ate when we were kids?” He questions absently, and he sees the way his brother visibly tenses, but before he can actually reply, the timer on the microwave beeps.

Vergil stares hard at the inside of the microwave, as still and unmoving as a statue, and Dante raises a brow, seeing Nero tilt his head in confusion out of the corner of his eye, both of them evidently wondering why the hell Vergil was just standing there when his food was ready.

“Uh, you good?” Dante hesitates to verbally prod at his brother, because when Vergil went completely silent like this, he was either absolutely embarrassed or prone to grab Yamato and slice the object of his attention to bits. 

“...yes,” Vergil says, after an entirely too long pause. 

He takes a deep breath before clenching his fists at his sides, and very slowly opens the microwave up. 

Dante can’t help his natural curiosity, leaning slightly to the side to take a peek at what Vergil was eating, even if his brother very clearly didn’t want him to know. With how many times Vergil’s looked down upon his junk-food habits with utter disdain, Dante’s interested in knowing exactly what kind of fancy fare his brother is consuming to put himself up on such a high pedestal.

Vergil very slowly removes a cup of instant noodles from the microwave, shifting to the side to put it on the counter as he stirs the soup inside with a fork, his expression determinedly blank.

Dante feels both like their birthday has come early and like he’s been slapped in the face by twenty-ton brick with how simultaneously gleeful and utterly floored he is.

 _“This_ is what you’ve been eating all this time? Verge, we’ve been back for like, two weeks! Where are you even keeping these?”

“Silence, Dante,” Vergil snaps in the most strained voice he’s ever heard from his brother, and Vergil grips his fork so hard that he accidentally bends the metal in his fingers.

Dante’s maybe being an ass—Vergil is so beyond embarrassed at having his junk-food preferences exposed to his brother that he looks like he’s bound to flee the room at any second now, if only to preserve what remaining shreds of dignity he has left. He’s always known that his brother has been more than a little self-conscious, despite the uncaring front he put up, and the fact that he was addicted to instant noodles didn’t quite match up with the “elegant” and stoic image that he knows his brother attempts to project. 

But he really can’t help it. Seeing his brother actually act like the human that he half is is so rare and surprisingly endearing that Dante finds it impossible to hide his smile.

“Nero, he’s been eating _instant noodles,”_ Dante turns to the kid to elaborate, trying his hardest not to laugh.

Nero, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to understand the gravity behind the situation, tilting his head again and blinking up at him with wide eyes before getting carefully down from his chair and waddling over to Vergil. He makes several attempts to push up the sleeves of Dante’s coat in order to expose his hands, and reaches for the end of Vergil’s coat once he manages to do so, tugging at it gently.

“Ah...yes?” Vergil looks down, very determinedly not looking at Dante as he slowly kneels on the floor to get to Nero’s eye level. 

“What is it, little one?”

Dante doesn’t think that even Vergil’s steaming cup of microwaved soup could match the warmth in his brother’s voice at this moment.

Nero offers Vergil another one of those tiny smiles before hesitantly pointing up to the counter, around the spot where Vergil’s noodles were.

“Are you interested in trying some?” Vergil asks uncertainly, his deadpan voice betraying a slight hint of excitement. 

Nero nods enthusiastically, cradling both of his hands close to his chest as he looks shyly at Vergil, and Dante thinks he knows how Vergil feels in this moment. He’d been eager to introduce the kid to pizza, after all, because it was always nice when you found someone else who shared your interests, and Nero’s approval somehow felt like a strange sort of validation. 

Vergil takes a small bowl from the counter, pouring some of his noodle soup out for the kid and, after a long moment of hesitation, he reluctantly walks over to the table, placing both portions on the table. Dante is already having trouble processing his brother’s existence in the room at all, much less his presence at the breakfast table.

“Here you are,” Vergil hands Nero a fork, and the kid takes it in his left hand, staring at it curiously. 

“Uh...he might not actually know how to use that,” Dante interjects, the slow realization dawning on him. 

Apparently, the people that Nero had been with hadn’t even bothered to feed him, so Dante had a seriously hard time imagining Nero being forced into those tedious etiquette lessons that he and Vergil had gone through as children, under the stern eye of their father, who insisted on them growing up properly.

“...hm,” Vergil looks thoughtful for a moment, before taking up his own fork and showing his hand to Nero. 

“Try it like this.”

At Vergil’s instruction, Nero looks down at his hands before hesitantly switching the fork over to his right hand to mirror Vergil. Dante reaches out to gently touch the kid’s wrist, ruffling his hair when he turns his attention to him.

“Hey, if you’re more comfortable with your left hand, it’s okay to stick with it,” he offers, taking into account the way that Nero always seemed to instinctively reach for things with his left hand first. 

“Just copy what he’s doing, and you should be good.” 

Nero frowns in concentration at his hands, his tongue sticking slightly out of his mouth as he glances between himself and Vergil, and Vergil places his hand over Nero’s, quietly adjusting the boy’s grip on the fork until he’s holding it the right way. 

Nero looks gratefully at Vergil at the correction, and curiously pokes at his noodles, not quite sure what to do with the fork now that he’s holding it. He peers at Vergil carefully from underneath his long bangs, watching as Vergil twirls the yellow, processed-looking noodles around his fork and sticks it in his mouth, a very faint, almost imperceptible flush of embarrassment on his face from Dante’s obvious staring.

The kid obediently follows suit, tilting his head as he chews carefully on the noodles.

“...what is your opinion?” Vergil asks, in the obviously practiced, uncaring sort of way that meant that he cared a whole lot.

Nero beams sunnily up at him, nodding happily in response, and Vergil’s face twitches like he’s having some sort of seizure or is maybe actually about to smile--you could honestly never tell these things when it came to his brother.

“You should take more vegetables, Nero.”

His brother scoops up some of the very sad looking dried carrots and peas and flaky green things from his soup and deposits it into Nero’s tiny bowl. Nero looks incredibly happy at this development, poking with special interest at the miniature carrot cubes.

“If those are vegetables, I’ll eat that whole paper ramen cup,” Dante remarks, and Vergil turns to glare at him with a look sharp enough to cut through steel. 

“Foolishness, Dante. They are clearly vegetables--more than what can be said for what goes on your pizzas.”

“Hey, leave my pizza out of this.”

Vergil doesn’t bother to dignify him with a response, instead returning his attention to the rest of his soup, and Dante catches Nero looking up at him with a rather pleased look on his face, something almost like relief crossing his features. 

Huh.

It’s obvious enough to Dante that his brother is far more relaxed than he’d been when the two of them had first come into the kitchen almost comforted by Nero’s indirect reassurance, and he can’t help his sneaking suspicion that the kid is a lot more perceptive than he might let on at first, going around and pulling off little things like this.

At any rate, Dante is starting to feel a little left out, being the only one without food, and he gives Nero another quick pat to the head before moving the fridge and digging around for pizza leftovers. As he warms up his pizza, he catches Vergil very subtly observing Nero out of the corner of his eye, his expression turning slightly dark when the motion of Nero’s arm shifts the too-loose collar on his shirt and expose a fraction of the injuries that Dante had seen on the kid earlier.

Right.

As heartwarming as this whole scene is, Dante really needs to start thinking about the important stuff. They’re not in any way equipped to take care of Nero, and the first thing they should probably start with is seeing if Nero’s acquired any permanent damage from whatever was done to him, as well as getting an overall medical analysis of the boy. 

“Need to talk to you,” he addresses Vergil when he returns with his plate of pizza, and his brother’s expression rapidly seals itself off, his whole body shifting to be on the defensive at Dante’s request.

Dante still isn’t entirely certain what his brother is trying so hard to hide from him or why he’s been giving Vergil the silent treatment all this time, but he subtly motions with his head towards Nero, hoping to indicate that he just wants to talk about the kid and nothing more. Vergil seems to get the message, because the tension in him deflates, and he goes back to stabbing at his noodles, still looking unhappy at the prospect of a one-on-one conversation, but was now at least willing to hear him out.

Luckily for both of them, Nero very easily falls back asleep after breakfast, probably because he’d been awoken prematurely by Dante’s own nightmares, which he definitely feels bad about, but the kid curling up on the couch gives Dante the opening he needs to discuss things with Vergil.

“...So,” Vergil says stiffly, snatching up his empty paper cup of ramen and tossing it in the trash before going to the sink, taking what Dante thinks is a little too much time to wash a single fork in what is almost definitely a flimsy excuse to avoid having to face Dante.

“Tell me what happened to the child.”

“Well, I got a look at him when he was changing out of that hospital gown thing--accidentally, I mean.”

There really isn’t an easy way to put his suspicions about what’s happened to Nero, and when he gives Vergil a full catalogue of the injuries he’d seen on the kid, the various scars digging into his pale skin and the bruises in absolutely the worst place possible, his brother seems to come to the same conclusion as he has. 

“I see.”

Vergil’s voice is unnaturally tight with a tranquil sort of rage, a deep-rooted sort of anger that Dante himself definitely feels on the kid’s behalf, even if Nero was probably too young to even understand what’s been done to him.

“And what of that mark engraved on his neck?”

Dante winces, thinking over the tattoo in his mind. He’s devoted quite a bit of time towards figuring out what the hell it’s supposed to mean, trying to place if he’s ever seen the accompanying symbol underneath the sequence of numbers and letters before, but despite his best efforts, he really doesn’t know. He definitely doesn’t like the implications of the style of the tattoo, how it looks like it was _carved_ into him with a blade, and thinking about it for too long conjures up fantasies of smashing the faceless assholes that did this to Nero into the nearest wall.

“Never seen anything like it. But...when I asked him what his name was, he showed it to me. So it seems like the bastards that raised him went around calling him that and decided to mark him with it for some reason.”

“Like an identification number.”

“A really fucked up thing to think about, but that was probably the intent, yeah.”

Vergil lips press together in a thin line, and Dante sees the way his hands, slightly hidden with the way his arms are crossed over his chest, clench so hard that his knuckles turn white. He stalks away from the sink, coming to stand over the couch and looking down for a long moment at Nero, who shifts peacefully in his sleep, cuddling up noiselessly into the folds of Dante’s coat.

“I think we should take him to a doctor,” Dante proposes once the silence between them stretches on for too long again.

Vergil studies Nero for a second longer before finally tilting his head up to make eye contact with Dante, and it’s probably the second time in as many days that his brother has actually looked him in the face. He doesn’t look very enthusiastic about the idea, his blank expression even less emotive than usual.

“What? You don’t agree?”

“...I do,” Vergil says, with an obvious amount of reservation in his voice, but whatever is causing his hesitation, he doesn’t seem overly-eager to share it. 

At least, not with Dante.

Vergil leans down, gently brushing the stray hair out of Nero’s face, and when he rights himself, he doesn’t look at Dante again, already slipping back behind a wall that Dante can’t reach past.

“Is that all you wanted to say, Dante?” 

There’s a hell of a lot more that Dante wants to say to his brother, and if he thought Vergil would actually let him, he’d force his brother to sit on that couch and unload every single question and sentiment that’s been piling up inside of him for the past eleven years and two weeks.

“Yeah. That’s it,” he frees his brother instead, digging the nails of his left hand into his thigh underneath the table, the skin of his palm prickling as he remembers the Vergil of his dreams.

Somehow, Dante doesn’t feel like he succeeded in saving his brother at all. 

Vergil swiftly turns in the direction of his room, but pauses with his hand on the doorframe. Dante stops mid-bite, trying not to hope too hard for anything.

“By the way,” he adds, in a reluctant sort of tone, and there’s another pause, the space filled by the audible sound of Dante’s chewing.

“...nice shirt.”

Vergil enters the room and slams the door behind him so quickly that Dante has to blink several times in stunned silence to actually put together what just happened. He looks down at his shirt, pinching the fabric between his fingers with an incredulous sort of disbelief.

_Nice shirt?_

God, Vergil was awkward. 

But Dante can’t lie to himself--he smiles like an idiot for just about the rest of the day, and when Nero awakens, some hours later, he presses his tiny hand shyly to Dante’s cheek and gives him that same look of relief from earlier.

“Hey kid--” Dante starts, wrapping Nero up in a hug from where they’re squished together on the couch. 

Dante’s always been a fan of physical contact, and Nero seems happy to cuddle up with him at every available opportunity. Despite his undernourished, bony appearance, the kid is soft and warm to hug, and Dante feels like he’s got an oversized stuffed animal curled up against his chest.

Nero looks up at him with a wide-eyed stare as Dante offers him his left hand for Nero to hold in both of his own smaller ones.

“So what do _you_ think about my shirt?”

 

* * *

 

The need to find a doctor to look at the kid is sharply increased about two days later, when it becomes increasingly evident that Nero’s injuries aren’t healing. 

Dante rarely gets a good look at him, mostly because Nero is still incredibly skittish about uncovering himself, and despite being very quick to initiate  contact and cuddle up with him, the kid still tenses up and flinches if Dante and Vergil move too fast or try to touch him when he isn’t looking directly at their hands. But the large shirts that he’s borrowing from Dante have the tendency to slip around and expose parts of his skin, and Nero has so many wounds that it’s difficult to look at any one part of him and not see them. 

The easiest reference that Dante has is the large, hand-shaped bruise around the pale skin of the boy’s tiny wrist. He’d seen it back when he’d first met the kid, and now, in the four total days that they’ve known each other for, the marks are still completely dark-purple, almost black. Since he and Vergil had the ability spontaneously regrow their entire organ systems in a manner of seconds, Dante admittedly is quite lacking in knowledge in this particular area, but he suspects that the bruise should have at least lightened up a bit by now. 

The rest of Nero’s injuries, from what Dante can tell, are in very much the same condition—even the minor cuts and scrapes littering his body look fresh and barely clotted, and Dante finds his Vergil-related nightmares starting to become interspersed with ones of Nero reopening his wounds and bleeding out in his hands while Dante, absolutely and undoubtedly the most useless half-demon hybrid in the world, can do nothing to fix it.

Dante’s never thought of himself as much as a worrier, always preferring to move along in the present and let things work themselves out in due time, but Nero is so fucking tiny and helpless and Dante and Vergil are quite possibly the only two people in the world who care about this kid.

”Need your help,” he admits over the phone to Lady while Nero sleeps peacefully against his chest, smiling faintly as the kid nestles further into him. He drops his free hand into the boy’s hair in response, running his fingers gently through the fluffy locks.

“Dante, what the fuck,” says Lady in response, likely because it is three in the morning, and he senses that she’s about five seconds away from hanging up on him and going back to bed. 

“Either your brother’s broken out and is freely murdering innocent humans again, or you’ve magically come to your senses and need help disposing of him. If it’s not one of those two things, it can probably wait ten or so hours.”

Dante internally winces at Lady’s still dismal opinion of Vergil and decides to cut straight to the point.

“I need to find a doctor.”

“...this better not be some new kink.”

Lady knows full well that neither Dante nor Vergil have any need to see a doctor or receive human medical attention themselves, and he can hear the way her already thin patience frays even further. He’ll have to rely on shock value, if he doesn’t want this conversation to end right here. 

“It’s for my kid.”

 The speed at which Lady hangs up on him is enough to tell him that she’s about to kick down his door to see this mythical child of his, fully prepared to shoot him in the head if she discovers Dante’s just putting her on. He figures he has fifteen minutes of time to kill before that inevitable confrontation happens, so he might as well put a shirt on and get Nero properly downstairs. 

“Hey, Nero. Sorry to wake you, but you up for meeting one of my friends? She’ll play nice, I swear.”

At least, he hopes so. He certainly hopes that she won’t be whipping out any of her various guns around Nero, but Lady has always displayed a semi-reasonable amount of common sense in the past--by Dante’s standards, anyway.

The bundle on top of him takes a moment to actually stir awake, his baby blue eyes flickering open sleepily as he rubs the sleep out of them with the too-long sleeves of Dante’s shirt. He yawns soundlessly before trying to focus on Dante, looking unfairly adorable with his fluffy hair sticking up in every direction, before giving him a shy nod. 

The level of trust that Nero puts in him after knowing him for such a short time should honestly be illegal, and Dante chuckles with slight relief as he pulls on a shirt and scoops Nero back up in his arms, sitting on the edge of the bed for a moment and trying to look the kid in the eyes.  

“Hey, I’m serious about asking you for permission, you know. If you don’t feel up to it, feel free to go right back to sleep, okay?”

Dante gets the impression that Nero hadn’t been asked for his consent on a whole lot of things before this, things that were definitely a lot more serious and important than what Dante’s asking him for now. From the way that Nero so readily complies with people’s orders, he figures that Nero’s concept of personal agency has been seriously compromised, and that the best way to get him to understand that his choices about his life were his own was to double check on the little things like this.

Nero continues to smile sunnily at him, though, looking rather optimistic to meet this new person, and he reaches for the end of Dante’s shirt, tugging on it with slight impatience in his movements.

“Alright, okay, we’re going.”

He barely makes it outside of his second-floor room before a resounding crash, followed by muffled voice and what sounds suspiciously like the sound of a gun cocking drift up from the ground level. Lady must have arrived faster than he’d thought.

“Don’t worry. It’s just her and Vergil. They don’t like each other much.”

It’s a bit of an understatement, because by the time he makes it downstairs with Nero in his arms, Lady and Vergil are staring each other down, a firm, thick layer of chilly tension between them. Or rather, Lady’s staring him down and Vergil’s staring at the wall. One of the tables between them has toppled over, likely the source of the crash that Dante had heard earlier.

Right. Excellent.

Lady’s got her hand on one of her trusted firearms at her waist, while Vergil, underneath the guise of appearing wholly disinterested, is gripping the sheathed blade of Yamato a little too tightly to be completely casual.

“So I see you’re still hanging around, you parasitic dirtbag,” Lady greets Vergil as warmly as ever, neither of them having noticed Dante’s presence yet.

“How uncouth of you to drop by at this hour, unannounced, _Mary,”_ Vergil sneers to the wall, and barely tilts his head out of the way in time as a bullet embeds itself into the wall, the scent of gunpowder faintly hanging in the air.

“Forgetting my name so easily, huh? Need me to beat it into your head?”

Lady steps forward, and Vergil finally properly turns to face her, and Dante can read the tension in Vergil’s body, at how eagerly his twin is looking for a fight, the excitement rippling through his form despite his efforts to appear unfazed. His hand goes to the hilt of Yamato, and the blade scrapes slightly against the sheath as he shifts it upwards by an inch.

Dante’s more than ready to interfere, but before he can actually come between them, Nero starts to actively squirm in his arms, hard enough that Dante’s actually afraid that he might drop him.

“Wait, kid--!” He tries to keep hold of him, but at the same time, the fear of squeezing Nero too tightly and accidentally hurting his fragile frame puts an unconscious mental restraint on his movements, and Nero is a lot stronger than he looks.

He manages to pull himself free, and it’s all Dante can do to lower himself more towards the ground so that Nero lands easily on his two bare feet without harm. As soon as he touches the floor, Nero hurries forward on his tiny legs, nearly tripping over the hem of Dante’s too long shirt and pushes himself in front of Vergil, tilting his head up to glare at Lady. The kid is obviously not very confident in his actions, trembling from head to toe, likely still startled by the loud noise of the gunfire, but he clenches his fists at his sides and looks her in the eye as best as he can.

“Uh...and who are you, little boy?” Lady asks, clearly confused, although from the way she narrows her eyes and looks between him, Vergil, and Dante, he can tell that she’s already putting the pieces together.

Nero swallows hard, the tears already starting to gather in the corners of his eyes, as his fear seems to increase just by being addressed, but he inches himself backwards, as close to Vergil as he can possibly get without actually ducking behind the man.

It takes a too-long moment before all three of the other occupants in the room come to the conclusion that Nero is actively trying to _protect_ Vergil from what he deems to be a threat, despite being three sizes smaller than the rest of any of them. 

Dante has never seen Lady look so eager to put away her guns as she does now, hastily stowing it away in its original place as she glances at Dante, who starts towards Nero in order to comfort him and explain the situation properly, but Vergil beats him to the punch, getting down to Nero’s eye level again and putting his hand in the kid’s hair, setting Yamato carefully on the ground with his other.

“...Thank you, Nero. I will be alright, though,” Vergil reassures the boy in an unusually strained voice, his eyes flickering with a foreign emotion.

Nero looks dubiously between him and Lady, before pointing with a tentative finger towards the Yamato on the ground, and Vergil follows the motion with his eyes before he focuses on Nero again.

“My apologies--she certainly wasn’t enough of a threat to require actual force. I was simply...irritated by her insignificant presence.”

Leave it to Vergil to still find a way to get his kicks in.

Nero seems a little more assuaged by this, and hiccups silently before nodding and slowly uncurling his defensive posture. Vergil gently runs his hand through the kid’s hair, but seems to hesitate at the last moment, his face settling into an unreadable expression.

“However, the fact still stands that you hardly know me very well, Nero. You should not be so willing to throw yourself into potential danger for the sake of others, especially not a mostly unfamiliar person such as I.”

He pauses again, and then his voice softens into something almost too low for Dante to hear.

“Pick your battles carefully, little one. Not all are worth it.”

Ouch.

Dante knows that the comment hadn’t been intended for anyone but Nero to hear, but still, the implication between Vergil’s words is obvious, and he tries to remember if Vergil had always been this open about his self-deprecation. Probably not--after all, they didn’t have too many issues when they were eight years old and everything was going well for them.

The kid tilts his head in confusion, blinking up at Vergil for a few long seconds before he seems to realize what Vergil means. 

Nero looks more upset that Dante’s ever seen him as he shakes his head vigorously, pushing himself forward and hugging Vergil as best as he can, his arms too short to wrap all the way around him. Dante sees the way his brother stiffens, as if he’s unsure of what to do with this newfound affection before the hand on Nero’s head slowly moves downwards to press against Nero’s back. He audibly sighs out, his posture relaxing as he drops his head slightly into Nero’s hair and shifts to more properly hold Nero.

Dante doubts that his brother has been hugged since they were eight, and the awkward, tense way that Vergil returns the hug is a definite confirmation of his suspicions. The candidates of the pool of people willing to hug Vergil at this point was at an all time low--Dante would hug his brother if he thought Vergil would let him, but they all know what the outcome of such a thing would be.

Watching them is a little more than his heart can take at the moment, an unusual tightness starting up in his throat, so he instead coughs lightly as he moves closer to Lady, who is watching the display with an incredibly soft expression on her face, one that hardens into a glare when she sees him coming.

Dante puts his hands up in supplication, unsure of what exactly his crime is this time.

“He’d better not actually be yours, Dante, or else you’re going to have to explain to me how all of that happened to him.”

She motions with her head towards the visible injuries peeking out from underneath the loose parts of the shirt, and Dante winces at the reminder.      

“Yeah, that’s sort of my problem. It’s why we need to get him to a doctor. We found him like that, more or less, just a few days ago.”

“Found him?”

Dante faithfully recounts the story of his run-in with Nero, already regretting it as he sees the smirk stretching across her face, her gaze shifting to an almost impressed look as she reexamines the kid, clearly filled with both surprise and a vindictive sort of glee that he’d managed to clean out Dante’s pockets.

“Damn. Kid like that should be working with me. His talents are wasted on you,” she elbows him lightly, though her concern for Nero’s physical condition is still reflected in her mismatched eyes.

“Yeah, real cute. You try and do the right thing once and you never live it down. Anyway, you know someone I can take him to?”

Lady looks thoughtful, eyeing him carefully.

“You know it’ll have to be off the books, right? Any real doctor you take him to is pretty much legally required to go and report the kid to the authorities. They’ll dump him in an orphanage before either of you can do anything about it.”

Right. Dante had actually forgotten about that little detail.

He’d never been in the system himself, given the isolated nature of their family home and the fact that he’d been able to successfully run around and away from the demons for years without getting caught by either the police who thought they could help or the wrong end of a nasty set of claws. Still, he’s seen the fairly dismal state of the orphanages around here, and even though there are nicer ones around the better parts of town, Dante definitely isn’t willing to let a kid like Nero go off alone in them.

“Great. So a sketchy black market doctor, then.”

The idea of taking this five-year-old, fluffy kid to see one of those same underworld “professionals” whose areas of expertise likely centered on pulling bullets out of notorious and hardened criminals doesn’t exactly sit well with Dante, but he also knows how well money buys secrecy there. If he brings Nero there, he’ll get the examination he wants and the results he needs, no questions asked.

“I might know a few of those. A lot of those, actually.”

Dante has little doubt in his mind of the accuracy of that statement, and trusts her well enough to find an appropriate contact for them. 

“Cool. You wanna meet the kid?”

Lady gives him another one of those sideways looks, but doesn’t actually respond, but from the way she looks at Nero, who is still fussing over Vergil and trying to smooth out the wrinkles in Vergil’s coat with his tiny hands, he gets the sense that she very much does want to meet Nero.

“Yo, Verge--stop hogging him all to yourself. I know he’s cute, but you gotta share. Can’t write your name on this one.”

He wonders if Vergil still remembers it, the way they used to fight over everything when they were kids, to the point where they’d made that stupid rule--if you wrote your name on it, it was yours and yours alone. 

Vergil gives him a withering glare at his little inside joke, before slowly standing up and guiding Nero towards them. Nero seems pretty unsure about getting close to Lady, but at Dante’s nod of reassurance, he waddles forward, gazing shyly up at her and ducking his head downwards in a silent apology.

“Aw, kid, don’t feel bad,” Dante leans forward, ruffling his hair before motioning towards Lady.

“Um. Hey,” she tries softly, kneeling on the ground, and Dante can tell from her barely noticeable nervous ticks that she feels more than a bit guilty for having scared Nero earlier.

“He, uh, doesn’t talk,” Dante quietly interjects, and if either of them hear it, they don’t seem to acknowledge him.

Nero shuffles in place, bringing his hands close to his chest as he looks her up and down for a moment longer, but seems a little too shy to actually do anything, eventually keeping his gaze cast firmly on the ground.

Apparently deciding to take the initiative, Lady slowly extends her hand to him, offering a handshake, but Nero looks at it like he has no idea what to do, and it occurs to Dante that he might really not even know this type of customary greeting. After what looks to be much deliberation, Nero reaches forward and presses his tiny palm up against her own, curiously tilting his head.

“Well, good enough,” Lady laughs softly, warmth already starting to seep into her tone, and at the sight of her smile, Nero shyly offers a smile of his own in return.

It’s abundantly clear to Dante from the way that Lady practically melts that Nero’s already won her over with his innocent charms, not that Dante can exactly blame her.

Vergil grunts from beside him, and Dante tries to subtly examine his brother out of the corner of his eye, noting the very slight almost-pout starting to form on his face, as if his brother is jealous of all the newfound attention that Lady is getting from Nero.

“Don’t worry, Verge--I’m sure Nero still loves you. Right, Nero?”

At the sound of his name, Nero startles and looks up like a surprised rabbit, the words processing in his mind before he happily and enthusiastically nods at them in agreement.

Vergil makes another noise, this time akin to that of a choking goose, and he abruptly covers his mouth with his hand, looking determinedly off to the side, the edges of his ears turning slightly pink.

“You good?” Dante asks, unable to help the grin that spreads across his face as he leans further into his brother’s personal space.

“Silence,” Vergil manages to say, not bothering to push Dante away, much to his own surprise.

Who knew. The key to defeating his brother once and for all was apparently to show him a picture of Nero’s smile.

He watches fondly as Nero gets to know Lady, letting the little meet-and-greet go on for a little longer until Nero himself comes over to Dante and tugs expectantly on his leg, holding his arms up towards him. Dante indulges in the nonverbal cue, easily scooping him back up, and Nero seems right at home in his arms, nestling his face back into the crook of Dante’s neck.  

“You sure are getting used to this, huh?”

His only reply is the fluttering, ticklish feeling of Nero’s soft hair against his skin as the boy shifts his head and relaxes against him, showing all the signs of being about to drift off and back to sleep.

“Yeah, you’re right. I’ve definitely kept you up for long enough. I’ll be back--no one start any fires while I’m gone, yeah?”

“You got it,” Lady drawls, moving to fling herself on their couch, making her intentions to crash at their place clear.

Vergil doesn’t actually say anything, but he doesn’t draw Yamato and start slashing away at various objects with reckless abandon either, so Dante decides to translate it as a sign of agreement. He’s gotten pretty good at interpreting silence, after all. 

Nero is quick to fall asleep as always, and by the time that Dante is actually tucking him into the bed, he’s all but dead to the world, rolling over when Dante sets him down and wrapping himself around one of the spare pillows like a koala. Dante takes his fair time relishing in the sight, brushing Nero’s bangs gently out of his face and pulling up the blankets a little more before heading back downstairs.

Neither of the other two occupants have killed each other yet, which is certainly a sign towards improvement, probably as a result of the residual warmth from Nero’s appearance. The kid could honestly probably inspire world peace if Dante went around and showed off the boy’s near angelic smile to everyone.

He’s fully expecting his brother to get up and leave when Dante properly sits back down at his desk, but he doesn’t move from where he is, stiffly positioned in another, further away chair with his arms crossed over his chest. 

“By the way,” Dante starts cautiously, trying not to so obviously stare at his brother, at least, not enough to actually make Vergil uncomfortable and encourage him to leave.

“Did you happen to see that tattoo on his neck? You recognize the symbol?”

She frowns in thought, and Dante expects that she maybe needs a visual reminder. He reaches over for a spare napkin, snatching a loose pen from one of his drawers and doodling out a replica of the sigil underneath Nero’s “identification numbers” from memory. As far as he can tell, it’s a picture of a sword, with two horn-like appendages adorning the hilt at the top and what could possibly be a wing wrapped around one side of the blade. 

His near flawless memory isn’t a talent he likes to showcase too often, but it definitely comes in handy at times like these, when the owner of the tattoo himself will barely allow them to get a look at his uncovered skin for longer than a couple of seconds.

“Here,” he flicks it over to her, ignoring the way her eyebrows raise in an undeniably impressed expression as she mentally compares the image with the one still in her short-term memory.

“Think I’ve seen something like it before. Not too sure where, though. I gotta look into it some more. Along with finding your doctor. I should demand payment for this kind of thing, with all the work I’m doing for you two.”

“Of course, you would feel entitled to such--”

“Well, there’s leftover pizza in the fridge,” Dante quickly cuts in before Vergil can actually complete his sentence. 

Despite Lady’s utterly unimpressed look, she gets to her feet anyway and sticks her head in, digging around for the box of leftovers while Vergil delivers another scathing sort of look at him. 

 _This is it,_ Dante can’t help but think, because he’s honestly put up a mental timer for how long it would take Vergil to disappear again.

“Did you put the boy properly to sleep?” Vergil inquires instead, and Dante allows himself maybe three or four seconds of flabbergasted silence before forcing a response out of himself.

“Uh, yeah. He likes my bed--snuggles up to my pillow like it’s a damn plush toy.”

Vergil nods stiffly, then resumes his staring contest with the wall, as unmoving as a statue.

Well. This was certainly a new development.

Lady comes back with a slice of pizza for herself and an extra for him, which takes gratefully, happy for the distraction. She seems to notice the awkward tension between them and strikes up a conversation that Dante isn’t so sure he cares about, but jumps in anyway, happy enough to pretend like things are normal.

They go on like that, talking about nothing until the sun rises, all while Vergil crouches in his chair in the corner like some sort of gargoyle, and Dante all but forgets about his presence in the room when he falls asleep.

In the morning, Lady is gone, as expected, and there’s a killer cramp in his neck from the awkward angle he’d slept at. When he stands up, something slides off of his body, taking a fair amount of warmth with it, and it takes him a long moment of staring at the ground to realize that he’s looking at Vergil’s coat, the light-blue fabric standing out starkly against the wooden floorboards. 

Dante carefully picks it up in his hands, barely daring to hope for anything.

He steps slowly to the right, his gaze focusing in on the head of white hair poking out from one side of his couch, still half-pushed back from his twin brother’s forehead as Vergil sleeps contently.

He can’t stop the smile that stretches across his face, and he folds up the coat, setting it neatly on the kitchen table before going upstairs to check on the kid.

So miracles really do happen.

Maybe it’s time to start believing in Nero’s god after all.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HDHSH ok I’m back sorry this took like 1 billion years, I sort of ditched this fic in favor of finishing my other wip  
> pls forgive me and take all of baby newo’s floofy love

“I know what I am doing, Dante,” Vergil snaps, seizing the bag of bread from his hands and depositing it none too gently into the shopping cart, in a hurried sort of gesture that suggested both desperation and confusion on his part.

The loaf of bread bounces against the metal bottom of the cart, rattling it slightly and causing Nero to jump at the sound, twisting around to look at what was now occupying the space inside the cart with him. He reaches out tentatively for it, poking at it with a curious hand, his baby blue eyes wide from beneath his fluffy bangs, and Dante suddenly has the sneaking suspicion that this is Nero’s first time seeing a loaf of bread.

It’s a pretty big cause for concern in its own right, but, coupled with how painfully thin Nero’s frame is, it brings up a whole lot of thoughts that Dante would rather not touch upon.

“Right, I forgot. You’re the real expert here, yeah? All those secret trips to buy yourself those instant noodles--”

His brother makes a low, furious sounding growl in the back of his throat, his hand automatically flying to his waist and his fingers grasping at the empty air of the spot where Yamato was usually tied. Upon remembering that he was not, in fact, carrying a weapon upon his person, Vergil stiffly crosses his arms over his chest and averts his gaze, allowing Dante a moment to be silently thankful for having the foresight to prohibit his brother from bringing a space-warping katana into the local grocery store.

“Anyway,” he continues, trying his hardest to stifle his grin of victory and instead reaching into the pocket of his red coat, fishing out the handwritten grocery list that Lady had tossed into their faces when she’d come to visit Nero yesterday.

She’d been pretty concerned about Nero’s diet, and the look on her face when Dante had informed her that they’d been feeding the kid pizza and various flavors of instant noodles for the past week and a half would probably serve to haunt Dante’s nightmares for the next century or so. Dante had partially wanted to defend their behavior, especially since Nero himself seemed pretty happy about eating what they gave him, but Lady is admittedly much better at the whole “being a human” thing than either Dante or Vergil are.

“So we’ve been here for thirty minutes, and we’ve finally gotten the bread. It might be the only thing we’ve done so far, yeah, but good for us, right?”

Vergil eyes him with disdain, then looks back at Nero, who has flipped the bread over and is squinting carefully at the small text printed on the back of the bag, tracing the letters with his fingers.

Huh.

Somehow, it’s the first time that it’s ever occurred to Dante that Nero might know how to read--he’d assumed that the kid didn’t, mostly because Nero hadn’t seemed to know how to write. He’s not actually sure if Nero currently knows what he’s doing or not, but the kid seems thoroughly engrossed in his task, anyway.

“Anything interesting, Nero?” Vergil inquires, apparently sharing Dante’s train of thought.

At the sound of the question, Nero suddenly flinches, looking up at them with a mixture of surprise and what could be fear before he quickly straightens out his expression and shakes his head a little too quickly to be natural. It’s not a good or normal reaction in any way, and Dante can already tell that this is one of those “sensitive” topics with Nero.

The kid has a lot of those, actually, as they’ve discovered over the week.

He absolutely hates water, for one--he’ll take showers in private and handles the rain just fine, but when it comes to being submerged in a body of water that comes up higher than his ankle, the kid totally freaks out. It had taken another panic attack and one of Vergil’s miracle mediation sessions to properly learn that unpleasant fact.

Another thing is that Nero has learned--or maybe was _trained_ \--how to make himself absolutely invisible. 

It isn’t just the no-talking thing. The way that Nero moves is always careful and quiet, his tiny steps painstakingly calculated to avoid certain spots in the flooring that made too much noise, and whenever Dante or Vergil turn too quickly or happen to “notice” him, Nero always flinches away like he’s afraid of being punished for it. 

Dante and Vergil have both learned to adapt around these behaviors, but it definitely doesn’t make the existence of them any less concerning.

He shares a silent glance with his brother, noting the way that Vergil’s grip on the side of the cart tightens as his lips press together in a thin line, and he suspects that Vergil, too, is filing away this interaction into his memory, to think about later at a time when Nero was not present. 

“Sorry if we startled you, kid,” Dante says aloud, slowly reaching forward to ruffle the boy’s hair.

Nero watches his hand intently, before ducking his head and giving Dante silent assent to actually touch him, leaning into the palm of his hand with a shy smile. He shakes his head, possibly dismissing the need for an apology before tugging the loaf of bread back into his lap, smiling down at it contently.

It doesn’t quite look like he’s reading the label anymore, but before Dante can actually ask the kid what he’s up to, Nero bundles up the loaf of bread and hugs it close to his chest, dropping his face into the soft dough and slightly squishing the entire thing.

So Nero really didn’t know the intended purpose of bread, after all.

“Oh...wait…” Dante starts to protest, but Nero looks so _happy_ holding an inanimate bag of bread in his arms that Dante can’t bring himself to say anything to the contrary.

“...at least it is still edible, even if a bit...flat,” Vergil notes, apparently equally unwilling to put a stop to Nero’s fun.

After a moment, Nero pokes his head up from his loving, whole-grain embrace, and, upon seeing the looks on their faces, tentatively holds out the semi-flattened bread, offering it up to both of them for a turn. 

Dante can’t help but chuckle at Nero’s willingness to share, patting the kid on the head again and gently pushing it back towards him.

“Nah, it’s okay. You can keep it for yourself. We’re about to get a bunch of stuff, anyway.”

He consults the list again, looking beneath the first item to the rest of the objects listed out. He recognizes them, sure, because a lot of them double as toppings that he puts on his pizza, but he doesn’t think he’s actually seen some of this shit by itself in maybe ten years.

“We should split up,” Vergil proposes, and something in his neutral tone strikes Dante as incredibly suspicious. 

“It’ll go faster if we both cover separate areas. You can go find the, ah...fruit.”

“Oh yeah? And what will _you_ be doing?” 

Vergil’s eyes flicker rapidly to the side, his jaw clenching as he remains stubbornly silent, and Dante follows the motion of his gaze, his attention captured by Aisle 10 in particular, which contained “rice, beans, noodles, and various ‘Asian Foods.”

Dante is more than a little stunned, both at the fact that his brother’s pride would even allow him to consider purchasing his guilty-pleasure food in broad daylight and at the notion that Vergil would do it in front of _him._ Somehow, the idea of this makes Dante feel weirdly warm in the pit of his stomach, and he decides that Vergil’s bare-minimum trust in him should maybe be rewarded.

“I mean, uh...yeah. Nero and I are going to go find some strawberries. And they won’t be in ice cream form, although they really should.”

Vergil’s form relaxes slightly, and he nods his head stiffly before turning on his heel and stalking towards his destination. Dante lets out a half-laugh once he’s sure that his brother is out of earshot, grinning at the semi-confused look on Nero’s face. The kid gently puts his bag of bread down before getting slowly to his feet, shakily waddling up to the side of the cart and peeking over the top with wide eyes, trying to see where Vergil’s gone off to.

“He’s going to get his noodles,” Dante clarifies, seeing the deeply worried look on Nero’s face. 

“He’ll be back, don’t worry. Verge is just a real stubborn bastard who hates admitting that he’s just like the rest of us. Now, the two of us are going to go find the best and one of the only two acceptable fruits in existence.” 

Nero still looks confused, but at least a  lot less concerned, and he sits carefully back down in the cart and nods enthusiastically in agreement. 

With Nero’s approval, Dante properly pushes them out of the bread aisle and towards the colder end of the store, where he assumes that the non-packaged items are probably being kept. The kid shivers slightly at the drop in temperature, still dressed very loosely in smallest article of clothing that Dante could find in his closet, mostly because neither he nor Vergil wanted or knew how to engage in the task of children’s clothes shopping.

“You get cold easily, huh?” Dante asks, already clearing out a space to make another mental note. Right now, the city was in its warmer months, but since Nero was going to be staying them for as long as the indefinite future allowed, they’d definitely have to think about getting him something thicker and more well-fitting to wear soon—a scarf, maybe.

Nero looks up at him, tilting his head curiously, but before he can answer with any of his usual nonverbal gestures, the kid suddenly goes very still, his attention captured by something off to the right. Hesitantly, Nero points to the aisle directly next to them, an expression of obvious hope crossing his face. 

“You...want cereal?” 

From the confusion on Nero’s face, Dante suspects that the kid doesn’t know what cereal is, either, and is probably most interested in delving into this aisle due to the incredibly colorful assortment of boxes lining the shelves. Dante doesn’t see any harm in letting the kid look around, though, especially since Vergil is no longer following them and terrifying the nearby human shoppers with his unbecoming, bat-like behavior.

Nero seems especially eager to look at these things up close, if the way he’s quietly attempting to climb out of the cart is anything to go by. In order to spare himself the potential nightmare of having Nero fall out and crack his head on the tile floor, Dante scoops him up into his arms, smiling gently as the kid makes himself comfortable, snuggling into his chest. 

Personally, Dante doesn’t find cereal very worth getting excited about, but Nero’s genuine excitement is absolutely infectious, so when Nero tugs anxiously at the folds of his coat and points to one particularly rainbow-colored box, Dante has no choice but to take one off of the shelf.  

It’s a pretty hideous sight, all bright colors and fake sparkles, and Dante can’t decide if the designer of the box hit their head or the alcohol harder. 

“...Kwazy Kwispies. Made with ‘real’ marshmallows,” Dante reads the neon yellow blobby lettering aloud, his gaze unwillingly drifting to the grotesque blue and black bird looking mascot plastered beneath the name. 

Nero looks absolutely delighted, shyly clapping his tiny hands in an almost soundless motion, and Dante peers more closely at the preview of the cereal on the box. The thing looks like it’s about three-fourths marshmallows, and while Dante is either the last or second-to-last person who deserves to be talking about healthy eating, he has a sudden, terrifying premonition of Lady’s reaction if she were to find out he was feeding Nero spoonfuls of pure rainbow sugar.

He readjusts his grip on Nero, looking down at the kid and trying to think of the best way to break the bad news to him. 

“Look, Nero, I know you really like the way the box looks, but I don’t know if this is the best thing for you to be eating, yeah?” 

Nero blinks up at him, his teeth coming to bite down on his lip, before his entire being seems to deflate, and he nods sadly in agreement. 

Oh _fuck._

Dante would have preferred if Nero had thrown a tantrum at him or tried especially hard to convince him to keep the cereal. He knows that that’s probably what he would have done at Nero’s age if his parents tried to stop him from eating strawberry ice cream. Hell, even _Vergil_ was prone to the occasional silent bitchiness when he was forced to put down his books at the dinner table—his brother still did the silent and bitchy routine, even now.

But the expression on Nero’s face conveys nothing but pure defeat, a subdued, willing acceptance of Dante’s word.

“You know what, on second thought, it doesn’t seem so bad. Let’s...let’s get you a box or two,” Dante hastens to correct himself, moving back to the shelf and stacking another box of Kwazy Kwispies on top of the current one. 

Nero perks up at the sudden change, the hope in his eyes reflected in his tiny smile, and Dante feels like he’s been trampled by a stampede of particularly fuzzy kittens. He swallows past the tightness in his throat and deposits the boxes back into the cart, pausing as he looks at Nero’s bright, happy expression.

He’s never seen anyone look so purely, truly happy over something so small. 

Driven by some sort of instinct, or maybe by the warmth in his chest, Dante carefully lowers his head and brushes his lips against Nero’s forehead, feeling the kid squirm lightly in surprise. 

“Sorry,” Dante apologizes when he pulls away, although he can’t quite manage to muster up any true regret. 

“Hope you know that you’re just a little too cute for your own good, kid.” 

Nero blinks up at him for a long moment, his head tilted to the side. He doesn’t look upset or afraid or anything, so Dante doesn’t think he’s overstepped his boundaries into a place that Nero isn’t comfortable with, but he can never be too sure.

“Was that, uh...was that okay? I mean—“ 

Nero wiggles himself upwards, his small hand brushing very gently against the side of Dante’s face before he stretches up and presses a tiny, shy kiss to the edge of Dante’s jaw. It’s so light that Dante barely feels it, but by the time Nero settles back into his arms and contently rests his fluffy little head against Dante’s chest, Dante feels his heart fluttering against his rib cage, feeling painfully and almost unbearably _soft_ all over.

“Thanks,” he manages to choke out, putting Nero gingerly back into the cart.

The boy nods happily at him before picking up one of the Kwazy Kwispies boxes and looking fondly at the ugly cartoon bird on the front, giving it a gentle sort of pat. 

Dante thinks that it’s in his best interest to go meet up with Vergil as soon as possible, lest he start suddenly tearing up in the middle of the store over a five-year-old kid and a goddamn box of cereal.

Vergil is waiting for him on the outside of the aisle he’d disappeared into, his arms full of assorted instant noodle packages and his face carefully blank. 

Nero waves at him, clearly pleased to be reunited with Vergil after their fifteen-or-so minutes apart, and he pushes the cereal boxes and the loaf of bread to the side before pointing at the noodle packets in Vergil’s arms and patting the spot on the cart that he’d cleared out next to him.

“How generous of you, Nero,” Vergil states, obligingly placing his precious ramen in a pile next to Nero, who looks determined to take care of his newfound arrivals.

As he leans over the cart, Vergil catches sight of the cereal boxes—it was nearly impossible to miss them, given the brightness of the rainbow coloring—and his expression twists into a confused frown. 

“Is that...a box with some sort of large, repulsive bruise on it?” Vergil questions, nodding at the cartoon bird.  

“There certainly seems to be enough sugar in it—Dante, why would you buy such a thing?”

“It’s Nero’s cereal,” Dante tries to clarify, shaking his head slightly in warning, but the damage has already been done.

Nero shoots Vergil a deeply hurt look, cradling one of the boxes protectively to his chest, the cartoon bird turned towards him. He looks uncertain of himself, though, clearly worried by Vergil’s apparent ‘disapproval’ of his cereal. 

Vergil looks almost alarmed by Nero’s upset, his motions stilling as he blinks blankly down at the boy, and Dante can see the way his brother scrambles for his next words behind his carefully constructed mask of neutrality. 

“Not that...there is anything wrong with it. I, too, enjoy a good bowl of…” Vergil tilts his head, quickly trying to make out the blobby lettering on the rainbow box, struggling to hide his expression of distaste.

“...Kwazy Kwispies, from time to time.” 

Dante would eagerly give up eating pizza for the next month in exchange for a recording of his brother saying “Kwazy Kwispies.” 

Unfortunately, Vergil catches sight of the gleeful look on Dante’s face, and steps none too gently on Dante’s toe with the tip of his boot, the warning clear in his steel gaze. Dante tries his hardest not to yelp aloud, mostly for Nero’s sake, because the kid always got a little antsy whenever his and Vergil’s bickering progressed to the physical level, but Nero’s face is currently still squished up against the box, leaving him blind to Dante’s suffering.

Which is for the best, of course.

Dante decides to steer clear of any topics likely to provoke Vergil’s embarrassment any further, and instead turns his attention back to the rest of the grocery list which they have completed exactly none of.

“Okay, look, I’m starting to think this is way more trouble than it’s worth. Nero’s happy, you’re happy, I’m in excruciating foot pain, everyone’s satisfied. Maybe it’s just better to cut our losses now and get the hell out of here.” 

Vergil surveys the cart, which is nearly flooded by his instant ramen, and gives a self-satisfied sort of nod, having found the shopping trip rather productive.

Along the way to the register, they--or rather, Nero--picks up a few more colorful items from the aisles. The kid is most interested in the jar of strawberry jam, a can of peanut butter with a blue label around it, and weirdly enough, a bushel of carrots.

“These things are seriously nasty,” Dante warns Nero, holding the carrots cautiously between his fingers, but Nero stubbornly folds his arms across his chest, tips his fluffy head up, and looks right at Dante.

Dante lifts his gaze upwards, his eyes slowly moving to Vergil, who is apparently unaware of what Nero is trying to do.

“He gets this from _you,_ you know,” he informs his brother.

Vergil crosses his arms, lifts his chin, and glares icily at him.

“What foolishness are you speaking of now, Dante?”

Dante wisely keeps silent, focusing in on the sight to take a mental picture of sorts before depositing the carrots into the cart and giving Nero another pat to the head. 

By the time they make it out, Dante’s wallet is a lot lighter and his arms are full, with Nero nestled up close to him. Vergil’s silently agreed to carry his own ramen, thankfully, because the instant noodles are essentially the majority of the groceries, and because Nero is very quickly falling asleep in his arms, despite it being the middle of the day.

Dante is maybe overthinking things, but from what he can tell, Nero is too often tired during daylight, and Dante has a sneaking suspicion that it has a lot less to do with Nero’s age or activities and more with the fact that he’s found that Nero is always awake before he is, looking at Dante curiously every time he wakes up from his usual nightmares.

He catches Vergil watching Nero’s sleeping form, a slight frown on his face betraying his worry.

“Kid doesn’t sleep at night too well,” Dante says out loud, feeling somewhat obligated to explain, since Nero’s only ever next to Dante and Vergil rarely sees the kid at night.

From the looks of the dark circles standing out against his brother’s pale skin, none of them sleep very well at night, actually.  

He’s more likely to get a verbal answer from Nero than he is from his brother, though, so Dante chooses not to pry into things any further. Vergil hesitates for a moment, looking as if he wants to say something into the silence between them, but ultimately refrains, busying himself with staring down into his bag.

The awkwardness between them hasn’t lessened any since the other night when Vergil had dared to fall asleep in the same room as Dante for the first time. Vergil actually stays with him now, doesn’t barricade himself up and hide away for such long stretches of time anymore, but their conversations are still few and far in between, and are either about Nero or don’t exist at all.

Dante doesn’t know exactly what he’d been hoping for all this time, but it definitely isn’t this. 

Even with Nero’s presence bringing them together, Dante’s forgotten how to talk to his brother, and, given Vergil’s general personality, the burden of conversation was entirely on Dante. He had to be the one to reach out to Vergil, or nothing would happen between them at all.

Between Nero being mute and Vergil being Vergil, though, a part of Dante is growing more than a little tired of always having to be the one to talk, and he can’t quite smother the relief he feels upon seeing Lady lounging on his couch when they return.

“Not too surprised to see you here,” he comments, gently shaking Nero awake.

Lady’s been over at their place for the past three days straight, with quite obviously the sole intention of visiting Nero. The kid’s managed to worm his way into her heart amazingly quickly, and Lady showers the boy with attention nearly every chance she can get. Dante can’t exactly blame her--he and Vergil are no different, really.

Vergil makes a vaguely displeased noise in the back of his throat, exchanging a mutual glare with Lady before stalking away and discreetly stowing his packets of instant noodles into a nearby cabinet with almost alarming speed. He probably wasn’t quite ready to reveal his dietary habits to the world outside of their little home, then.

Lady doesn’t directly respond to him, more interested in eyeing the various grocery bags in Dante’s free hand, and from the look in her eye, she can already tell that he and Vergil have strayed a fair distance away from the intended shopping list. He’s about to defend himself from her inevitable jabs when Nero squirms his way downward, waddling towards Lady at top speed, his tiny arms extended towards her. 

Her gaze instantly softens as she leans down to meet him, the two of them ending up tangled in a half-sort of hug, with Nero’s arms wrapped around her neck as she gently picks him up and places him on her lap.

“So this dumbass dragged you out shopping, huh? Did you find anything you like?”

Dante has already relocated himself to the kitchen counter, starting to unpack the rest of the stuff, but at the sound of Lady’s inquiry, Dante holds up the box of Kwazy Kwispies and shakes it lightly. Nero perks up and points over Lady’s shoulder to the box, and she turns her head to properly look at it, raising an eyebrow at the sight of it. 

“That’s...very colorful,” she says vaguely, probably appropriately horrified by the design, as any sane, non-Nero person would be.

Nero nods cheerfully in agreement, not seeming to sense the hesitation in her tone, and the two of them chatter on for a bit longer--or rather, Lady talks and Nero listens, and Dante is left to stand awkwardly in Vergil’s vicinity. 

Now that his brother has finished stashing away his noodles, he doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with himself, staring somewhat sulkily at where Nero and Lady are, the barely noticeable cloud of jealousy passing over his features again. 

“She seems to be taking up a permanent residence in our home, Dante,” Vergil mutters underneath his breath to him.

Lady has a terrifyingly acute sense of hearing, though, or can maybe just tell that Vergil is talking about her from the force of his glare on the back of her head, because she stands up from the couch then, leaving Nero curled up on the corner of it. 

“Yeah, you would know a thing or two about that sort of thing, wouldn’t you?” Lady sneers at Vergil, and Dante chuckles lightly, nervously stepping in between the two of them, just in case things started to get a little heated, in the bad way that involved excessive amounts of shooting and stabbing.

“Anyways, I’m not sticking around for long today. Just wanted to let you know I found your doctor and all. He’s agreed to make a house call over here, for a sizable amount of cash. Because, you know, I didn’t think it was the best idea to take the kid to the shady dump that this guy is living in.” 

“Shady dump,” Dante repeats, growing increasingly skeptical about the quality of Lady’s contact with every word.

“You sure that this is a real doctor and not a guy looking to make a quick buck?”

Lady rolls her eyes, apparently astonished that Dante would even consider casting doubt on her and the sketchy black market doctor he’d asked her to find. 

“Relax, Dante. I love the kid too. I wouldn’t send over anyone that could hurt him. I gave the guy a pretty thorough talking-to to make sure he was who he claimed to be. He won’t be a problem.”

Dante glances at Vergil, who looks equally unenthusiastic about their prospects, but his brother doesn’t actively protest against Lady’s claims. If even _Vergil_ is willing to go along with this, then they probably really don’t have a choice. 

Lady seems to notice the resigned change in Dante’s demeanor and shoots him a grin, sliding a piece of paper across the counter in his direction before brushing past him and removing the entire leftover pizza box from their fridge.

“That’s the guy’s number. Call him up whenever you want him over, and he’ll answer. Probably. I’m taking this as payment, by the way.”

Dante pockets the piece of paper and decides to sacrifice his pizza on this singular occasion, if only because Lady’s been extremely helpful to them. Three or four slices of leftover pizza was a fair price to pay in exchange for a lead on Nero’s overall physical health, after all.

The kid pokes his head up over the top of the couch as Lady heads back towards the entrance, ruffling Nero’s hair gently as she passes. 

“Sorry, Nero,” she offers, looking down into his baby blue eyes. “Don’t have much time to stick around in this shithole today--but I’ll come visit later, okay?”

Nero nods slightly, giving her an encouraging sort of smile, and, without a single backwards glance at either Dante or Vergil, she exits the shop, pizza and all, leaving Dante alone with the silence once more. 

Luckily for him, though, Nero seems to have plans of his own.

The kid climbs down from the couch and hurries up to them, looking excitedly up at the kitchen counter where his box of rainbow cereal is, tugging at the end of Dante’s coat and pointing at it.

“Right, right, we’ll get you some.” 

Nero is way too tiny to reach either the bowls, spoons, or the box of cereal by himself, so Dante goes to assemble the full thing for him, pouring in the milk after quickly comparing the weight of the milk jug to that of Nero’s entire body and determining it impossible for the kid to do that himself, either. 

The cereal doesn’t look any more appealing now that it’s out in the open, what with the rainbow-colored balls of puffed wheat and the blobby, possibly eggplant-shaped marshmallows clogging up almost the entire bowl. Nero, though, is so excited that he positively squirms in Dante’s arms when Dante picks him up to help him onto the chair.

“And you are certain we should be feeding him this?” Vergil questions as he takes the seat opposite to Nero, eyeing the bowl of sugar with no small amount of caution. 

“Well, he really wanted it.” 

“And so you couldn’t say no.” 

“I mean, have you tried it? It’s pretty impossible,” Dante motions towards Nero, where the kid is happily eating his first spoonful of the stuff, his entire being practically lighting up as he does. 

Vergil studies Nero for a too-long moment, his hand coming up to run through his own hair, and his gaze undeniably softening. He seems surprisingly content to sit at the kitchen table with Dante and simply watch Nero in silence, until the kid looks up at them when he’s about halfway through his own bowl.

Nero surveys the situation around him, then gently nudges his bowl of cereal towards them, a hopeful sort of look on his face. 

Dante remembers the way that he and Vergil had both shared their own favorite foods with the kid, and had both been equally interested in knowing his reaction.

As much as he really doesn’t think putting any of that in his mouth is a good idea, Nero’s eyes are so wide and expectant that Dante finds himself getting out of his chair anyway, snatching up two spoons from a drawer. Vergil reacts with mild alarm when Dante shoves the second spoon in his face, as if he hadn’t expected that he’d be required to take part in this, as well, but one look at Nero immediately silences any protests he’d been about to make.

“You did say you ‘enjoyed a good bowl’ of this stuff, didn’t you?” Dante can’t help but add, relishing the venomous glare he receives from Vergil in return.

His brother stiffly snatches the spoon from his grasp and dips it into the cereal, taking up a spoonful and looking at Dante to ensure that he follows the motion.  

As quickly as he can, Dante stuffs the thing into his mouth.

It is, quite possibly, the worst thing that he’s ever tasted--the cereal is maybe supposed to taste like vanilla, but Dante can hardly tell through the mountain of sugar. He doesn’t dare to chew the marshmallows, too afraid of undoing the gelatinous seal on even more sugar, and feels them slide somewhat unpleasantly down his throat as a consequence. He tries his best to smile encouragingly at Nero, putting his spoon off to the side and gently pushing the bowl back to him.

“It’s, uh...it’s great,” he hastens to say, and is rewarded with Nero’s bright smile. “But...you know me. I’m not really that hungry, and I gotta save room for pizza.”

Nero seems to readily believe him, before tilting his head to look at Vergil. 

To Dante’s surprise, Vergil’s face is still blank, and he appears to be chewing slowly on the marshmallows, savoring the whole thing with a genuine enjoyment. 

“I quite like it,” Vergil answers, his voice free of the strain that Dante’s had possessed, a true smile gracing his lips.

“You _do?”_ Dante demands, unable to disguise the incredulity in his tone.

Vergil doesn’t respond directly to him, instead reaching out towards the bowl, nodding at Nero.

“May I?” 

Nero could not be more enthusiastic in his agreement if he tried, and, with Nero’s blessing, Vergil takes another bite of the cereal, one with conspicuously more marshmallows than his last spoonful.  

Either Vergil is an incredible actor, or both he and Nero have incredibly fucked-up senses of taste. The two of them make short work of the rest of the bowl, and, contrary to Dante’s logical concerns, the sugar coursing through Nero’s system seems to make him even sleepier.

“I don’t know how you took the second bite, much less all the ones after,” Dante mutters under his breath to Vergil as he rinses out the bowl in the sink, casting a glance behind him to make sure that Nero isn’t listening. 

The kid has his face pillowed in his arms, his features hidden and only his fluffy mop of hair visible, so as far as Dante can tell, Nero is pretty out of it.

“It was actually rather excellent—you are just weak, Dante. As to be expected from someone as impotent as you.”

“We _are_ still talking about a cereal called ‘Kwazy Kwispies,’ right?”

Vergil turns his face away, a fine layer of pink creeping up the back of his neck and lightly dusting his cheeks, which Dante chooses not to comment on. There’s another stretch of the usual silence between them, where Dante lets the water run for a little longer, just to have something to fill up the space.

“Uh...thanks, by the way. For coming with us to the store. Thought you were going to stay here all day, honestly.”

His brother stares into the empty sink, his hands hanging awkwardly by his sides. 

“I took part in it for my own gain. Think nothing of it.”

Dante fails to hide his smile quickly enough, shutting off the water and reaching for a towel to dry off the plate. 

“Sure, Verge. And here I thought you were getting lonely hiding in your room all day.”

“And you thought that I would turn to you for my first source of company?”

“Well, maybe if you were desperate enough. Which you probably are, all things considered.”

Vergil doesn’t answer him immediately, turning back to study the top of Nero’s head for a long moment, his thoughts slowly being trapped behind his usual emotionless mask. Their conversation is over, then, and Dante can feel the little window of opportunity he’s opened rapidly starting to slide shut again. 

They’ve made good progress, though—Vergil’s left the house for a whole half of a day—so he doesn’t feel too dissatisfied about letting this one go. 

Vergil glances hesitantly at him, taking a few steps forward, his eyes trained on the closed door of his room. His footsteps stall in place, though, and he pauses again before turning back to Dante, determinedly studying a spot right above Dante’s head.

“...I will run out of noodles in a week’s time. See that you are prepared to accompany me in resupplying them.”

Then, instead of burrowing into his room like a terrified, Vergil-sized squirrel, Vergil sits back down at the kitchen table, pours some Kwazy Kwispies directly into his hand, and begins to pick the marshmallows out of his palm.

Dante thinks that his absolutely stunned silence must go on for a little too long, because Vergil looks up after a moment, raising a brow at him.

“You never did pay attention to Mother’s lessons in etiquette, Dante. It’s rude to stare.”

He kicks the chair from across him in a nonverbal indication, careful not to disturb Nero, and Dante cautiously lowers himself into it, directing his gaze up to the ceiling so that he isn’t looking straight at Vergil. His brother doesn’t say anything else, continuing to eat his marshmallows in silent content, and Dante slowly feels the tension in the pit of his stomach starting to drain away, the air between them a little more comfortable. 

Vergil isn’t much of a talker, but his brother is so clearly _trying,_ and for Dante, after eleven years and an incredibly antagonistic two weeks, that’s more than enough.

“Thanks,” Dante says again, for a whole lot more than the shopping trip.

His brother doesn’t look at him, pushing the cereal box between them at an angle that slightly obscures his image from Dante’s vision, but Dante knows what his own face looks like when it smiles.

“I told you to think nothing of it. Put it out of your mind,” Vergil repeats, his words firm but his tone soft.

So Dante does--for now, at least--and learns to enjoy the silence.

 

* * *

 

Dante can’t sleep.

He isn’t sure if it’s because of the way his mind refuses to shut up, or if it’s because of the concentrated blast of sugar he ingested earlier in the day, but even when he lays completely still and closes his eyes and tries to match the sound of Nero’s deep, even breathing, he stays wide awake. It’s annoying and utterly exhausting, and Dante feels sharply how long the nights really are.

Maybe it’s better this way. If he doesn’t sleep, then he doesn’t dream, and if he doesn’t dream, he won’t see himself standing alone and empty on that ledge, his left hand dripping with blood and his eyes stinging as he looks down into the dark.

The dream only gets more vivid each time he has it, and every time he jolts awake in the morning with his heart in his throat and his hands trembling uncontrollably at his sides, Nero looks more and more worried. The kid is clearly concerned that his little prayers aren’t working, but he keeps them up for him anyway, has done them every morning of the week since they’d met.

Dante doesn’t like seeing Nero upset, even if it’s technically not his fault that things are this way, and he’s honestly considering asking Vergil if he wouldn’t mind taking over and cuddling up with Nero for the next few days or so, just so the kid can have a peaceful morning.

But the boy is admittedly warm and soft next to him, usually nestling his fluffy head right in the crook of Dante’s body, and Dante’s gotten more than used to having company next to him during the lonely nights. He definitely won’t and will never claim ownership of Nero, but Dante’s a little selfish--a part of him likes sharing these private moments with the kid.

Nero shifts next to him, and the weight of the bed dips slightly as the boy stirs awake. Dante tries to keep his own breathing even and his eyes shut, mostly because he’s almost certain that Nero would worry for him if he found him up at this hour, but also because he’s a little curious as to what has Nero awake. 

The boy doesn’t sound any worse for the wear--his breaths are stable and Dante doesn’t think he can sense any of Nero’s usual defensive, upset motions. Just to be sure, he cracks open an eye, wide enough to properly see Nero, thankful for the dim lighting that mostly masks his features from view. 

Nero is rubbing sleepily at his eyes, peering around him carefully, his eyes landing on the bedroom door. He tilts his head down to study Dante, but doesn’t seem to notice that he’s awake, even as he reaches over with a small hand and tugs the blanket covering him upwards, tucking him gently in. 

With that done, Nero slowly wiggles off of the bed, employing his usual style of movement in order to drop soundlessly to the ground, stepping carefully around the creakier floorboards as he makes his way towards the door. 

The doorknob and the latch are too high for Nero to actually reach on his own, but the kid seems to have that figured out already. He silently moves to one of the tables, extricating a large book and holding it in both of his arms, stumbling slightly underneath the weight as he carries it over to the spot near the doorframe. This process gets quietly repeated a couple of times until Nero’s built himself a little staircase, pushing him upwards enough to throw the latch and ease open the door.

After the kid disappears from the room, Dante lays awake for a long moment, mentally debating with himself over whether he should actually follow Nero or not. On one hand, the methodical way that Nero had left the room suggests that he’s done this many times before, maybe for every night that he’s been here, and Dante’s curiosity is definitely at its peak. 

But given how much effort Nero had put into making sure that Dante stayed asleep during the whole thing, it’s fairly obvious that Dante wasn’t meant to know about his nighttime excursions at all. 

He can’t imagine what Nero would be sneaking out for, though--Dante likes to think that at this point, they’ve built up enough trust between them that Nero would just ask Dante if he needed something from outside of the room. That same trust maybe means that Dante should leave it alone, should let Nero go off to whatever it was that he was doing and try to sleep.

So he does try.  

He stays in bed and forces himself to relax into his pillows, but no matter what he does, his previous restlessness just latches onto this newfound curiosity and refuses to put his mind to rest. In the end, Dante gives up, pushing himself properly upright and running his fingers through his hair, searching for a stray shirt to pull over his head.

He’ll go see what Nero is up to, maybe, and come back before the kid even noticed he was there.

Taking care not to push aside the book staircase that Nero’s created, Dante follows the same path that the kid had taken, making his way out of the bedroom. As soon as he exits the room, he can see a faint light coming from the downstairs level.

Nero definitely isn’t tall enough to reach the lights on his own, so unless the kid had built an exceptionally tall structure to help him out, he’s got company. 

Dante quietly sneaks his way partly down the stairs, enough to catch sight of the back of his brother’s head, poking out from behind the couch.

Vergil shifts, a quiet rustling sound accompanying it, and it takes Dante a moment to recognize it as the sound of a turning page. He shouldn’t be too surprised--his brother always did like his books, after all. Dante just hadn’t thought that he’d had any of them actually with them here. The last he remembered of them, they’d burned down along with the rest of their home.

There’s another soft noise from next to his brother, and Vergil turns his head, the warm look on his face obvious even from Dante’s mostly obscured point of view.

“It’s a poem,” Vergil says quietly, and Dante belatedly realizes that he must be talking to Nero, who is so small that his entire form is hidden by the back of the couch.

“By William Blake--one of the better poets of his time, I’d like to believe.”

He can’t see Nero’s reaction, but it makes Vergil smile in response, his hand reaching out to presumably pat Nero’s head.

The two of them are sharing a quiet, comfortable moment, and Dante feels oddly like an intruder in his own home. He’s about to turn around and head back up the stairs and leave the two of them to it, when Vergil speaks again, and Dante finds himself unable to resist the temptation to listen in.

“I must say that I’m surprised to still find you here with me, Nero. Surely you have better things to do than keep me company at this time of night. You’ve been sleeping a lot during the day, so it certainly seems like you still need your rest.”

Dante recalls the worried way that Vergil had been looking at Nero, back in the grocery store, how his brother had seemed like he’d wanted to say something about it but had chosen to refrain. From all the facts put together, it seems like the two of them have been up to this for a while now, without Dante’s knowledge.

So Nero had come down here to keep Vergil company--but what _Vergil_ was doing up in the first place remained a mystery.

Dante is suddenly and somewhat painfully reminded of how little he knows about his twin brother now, how he couldn’t even say what would be keeping Vergil awake at this time of night. When they were younger, his brother would always sneak underneath the covers to read his books by flashlight, and while Vergil is still reading now, Dante isn’t too sure that it’s the primary reason for Vergil’s sleeplessness anymore.

“At any rate, as long as you continue to show interest in learning to read, I can hardly turn you away. And I won’t deny that your presence here is...beneficial.”

Dante isn’t an expert, but he isn’t too sure that any of the works of William Blake are the best teaching material for a five-year-old. Still, it does seem like his brother is right--Nero definitely is interested in learning how to do this stuff, if the way he’d been trying to decipher the nutrition labels on the back of the bread earlier had been any indication.

“It seems we all have a habit of staying up late, anyways. Isn’t that right, Dante?”

His brother tilts his head a little further back, enough to actually make eye contact with Dante, and Nero pops his fluffy head up a second later, his baby blue eyes widening as he spots Dante in the stairwell.

Great. Now Dante feels like a real creep.

“Well, it looked like there was a real party going on down here, so I decided to come check it out,” he drawls lazily, trying to appear casual as he makes his way properly downstairs.

Nero immediately presses himself closer to Vergil, eagerly patting the spot next to him in indication for Dante to come join them.  

Dante hesitates, looking over Nero’s head at Vergil, but Vergil merely places a gentle hand on the top of Nero’s head and remains focused on his book, either unaware or unbothered by what Nero is trying to do. The kid tilts his head when Dante stalls for a little too long, biting his lip in concerned thought before ducking out from underneath Vergil’s hand and reaching for one of the pillows on the couch, fluffing it up several times before patting the cushions again.

“Trying to make me comfortable, huh?” Dante chuckles softly, feeling his chest warm as he flops onto the space provided to him by Nero. 

The second he settles in, Nero instantly wraps his tiny arms around him in a hug, peeking up at him curiously from underneath his bangs. Something like guilt is stirring in the depths of his eyes, and Dante hurries to pet the kid’s hair, trying to put his fears to rest. 

“Don’t worry. You didn’t wake me up--I just wasn’t really able to get to sleep tonight. Decided to come join you guys down here. If that’s alright, of course.” 

He glances at Vergil again as he says the last part, and his brother finally looks up, his expression neutral. In the dim lighting of the shop at night, the tired and drawn set of Vergil’s pale face is even more obvious, and Dante wonders how he hasn’t noticed it before. 

“It is your own home. You are welcome wherever you please.” 

“Yeah, I figured,” Dante replies dryly, moving his hand away from Nero’s head as he stretches his cramped muscles out.

“So, what? You just stay up all night and read until Nero goes back upstairs?”

Vergil looks dangerously close to pushing his walls upwards and shutting himself away, but after a moment of deliberation, he gives a tiny jerk of his head, like he’s nodding to himself, before deciding to answer the question. 

“That is the general summary of it, yes. Nero usually remains with me until I fall asleep myself--then, likely, he returns to your room without you knowing it.”

“Kid must be real interested in reading, then. Can’t imagine any normal child willingly subjecting himself to that kind of stuff.” 

Vergil shoots him a look of disdain, his fingers trailing over the page that his book is currently open to.

 _“I_ enjoyed this material when I was around his age, Dante.” 

“I said _normal_ child, didn’t I?” 

His brother doesn’t bother to dignify him with a response, turning another page in his book, which causes Nero to scoot back towards him, peering over at the text with a genuinely invested expression on his face. He smiles up at Vergil, listening intently when Vergil reads the title out loud to him, and touches the letters gently with a tiny hand.

“Guess it’d make sense that the kid would be into your little book club. He’s pretty clever, you know.”

Nero twists back to look at him, tilting his head in slight confusion at Dante’s praise.

“Saw that staircase you built--smart move, making sure you got what you wanted without waking me up.”

The kid instantly flushes pink, his hands coming up to cover his cheeks and most of his face as he hides slightly away from Dante, apparently shy about receiving Dante’s encouragement, and Dante finds the soft look on his own face being mirrored in his twin’s as they both gaze down at Nero.

“He is a fast learner indeed. It has been less than two weeks and he already knows most of the words in this book. Unusually smart for his age, I would say.”

Nero looks like he might actually explode from the two compliments he’s received, and as much as Dante thinks that this boy deserves the world and more, he doesn’t want to overwhelm Nero or anything.

“Good for him, yeah? Can’t say that I was quite as successful back then. I never really listened whenever Father went off on one of his tangents.”

The fond look in Vergil’s eyes doesn’t quite dissipate, for once, as he turns his attention to Dante, and Nero curiously lowers his hands from his face to peer up at him, clearly curious about his past.

“That much was obvious. He even attempted to resort to bribery in a desperate bid to force you to pay attention. It was, of course, ineffective--I believe your skull was simply too thick to penetrate.”

Dante leans his head back, feeling a rush of amusement at the memory. His father had promised him an extra ice-cream sundae after dinner if Dante actually sat down and read through the whole novel that their father had been trying to teach them on.

Now that he’s quite a bit older, he admittedly finds the stuff a lot more interesting--he himself definitely isn’t opposed to sitting back with a good epic or two in his free time, but eight-year-old Dante had been a lot more invested in play-fighting with swords and arguing with his brother.

He wishes he’d listened more to his father back when they were kids. Maybe if he’d known then how little time he’d have left to complain about his work and procrastinate his way into extra dessert, he would have valued those moments more.

Dante feels a light tug on his shirt, and he looks down to see Nero’s little head-tilt of confusion. The way that Nero had pulled on his clothing clearly indicates that the kid is looking for an answer, and Dante mentally goes through his previous sentences. 

“You want to know about our father?” He tries, noticing the way that Vergil tenses out of the corner of his eye, but Nero bites his lip uncertainly, before slowly shaking his head.

It isn’t a firm denial, though, which means that Dante is halfway correct in his statement. 

“You...want to know about fathers in general?” 

Nero thinks this over for a bit before nodding in agreement, giving him a hopeful look, and Dante feels a sort of ache in his chest, dull and painful like a bruise. The kid doesn’t know what a father is, which all but outright states that he’s never met his--or maybe he had, and the man simply hadn’t gone by that title. 

Not surprising, considering how Nero was treated. 

“Uh, well…” Dante trails off, trying to find his own words, but he’s never really thought about the best way to explain a concept that seems so naturally ingrained to him. 

“I guess the actual definition of one is just any guy that helped put you on this earth in the first place, if you know what I mean. But it takes a whole lot more than that to actually be a good one--you gotta put in a lot of work.” 

He isn’t too great at sentimental talk like this, and he finds it more than a little hard to keep going as he reviews his own memories of Sparda. He and Vergil had been raised pretty well, all things considered--they just hadn’t had enough time to actually live everything out.  

“It is someone who cares for you, in essence,” Vergil says quietly, not taking his eyes off of his book.  

“Someone who places responsibilities and expectations on you, but only so that you may know how to eventually survive on your own, when the time comes.”

Dante feels his throat turn dry, running a shaky hand through his hair and trying to will away any particular memories of their parents.

“Yeah. That sounds about right. Verge has always been better with words, so take it from him.” 

Nero nods, a look of deep concentration on his face, before he glances between the two of them, biting his lip uncertainly. It’s easy enough to tell what the kid is thinking, even if he doesn’t outright state it, and Dante laughs gently, ruffling his hair gently and leaning down a little closer to him.

“Sorry--don’t think Vergil and I qualify for the position. We’re still trying to figure out how to get our own shit fixed up. Besides, we’re only nineteen. But don’t worry. We’re still gonna take care of you anyway, yeah?”

Nero nods in agreement, looking pleased just at having learned something new, and that pretty much puts an end to their “father” conversation, something Dante can’t tell if he’s relieved or not about. 

He doesn’t allow himself to think about their father too often, really. While he keeps a picture of their mother on his desk--something that Vergil has actually taken note of--and keeps her amulet safely on his person at all times, his father is a different story. The last memory he has of Sparda is more or less of his turned back, of his form disappearing on the path away from their house and into the night.

Dante used to blame him for what had happened, when he was younger, in the days when his grief was still fresh and he could still taste the ash and smoke from the remains of his home wherever he walked. Now that he’s older, he realizes that it was pretty impossible to control all the circumstances of life, that maybe Sparda hadn’t disappeared on purpose after all, but a tiny, undeniable part of him is still bitter and hurt.

Vergil doesn’t seem to feel the same way, from the way he speaks, but he’d always been closer to their father as a child than Dante was, had always spoken about wanting to emulate the way their father spoke and behaved.

A soft weight against him pulls him from his musings again, and he notices that Nero has essentially flopped against him, his eyes lidded and his form relaxes bonelessly into Dante’s side. After their little excursion outside, Dante isn’t too surprised that the kid is tired and unable to keep himself awake for too much longer.

“You should rest, Nero,” Vergil puts in, marking the page in his book and closing it softly, contemplating the kid quietly.

Nero rubs at his eyes, shaking his head insistently, but Vergil gives him a kind, understanding look, one hidden with enough meaning to make Dante feel like he’s maybe missing something here. 

“Do not worry, Nero. As you can see...I’m not alone tonight.” 

He says the last part with marginally more hesitation, avoiding looking directly into Dante’s face, but given the three-person occupancy of the room, Vergil’s meaning is unmistakable.

The kid sleepily flicks his eyes upwards to Dante’s face, looking a lot more reassured and cuddling up into Dante’s side again, his breaths starting to slow down and even out. Dante wraps an arm around him gently, keeping his eyes on the boy until Nero finally properly drifts off.

Vergil leans forward, placing his book neatly on the table opposite of the couch, before sitting up straight and actually choosing to face him. Dante sees the way that the muscles of his throat tense as he swallows hard, his blank expression threatening to crack. 

“So,” Vergil begins, and Dante is so surprised at his brother’s willingness to strike up conversation that he almost misses the rest of the sentence. 

“I’m surprised that you didn’t ask what I was doing here in the first place.” 

Dante blinks slowly at his brother, unsure of how far he’s allowed to go with Vergil’s sudden openness. 

“Well, uh...you don’t like to share too much, in case you couldn’t tell.” 

Vergil examines him carefully, but doesn’t look quite ready to put an end to things just yet, nodding to himself again in that small, subtle motion of his.

“But you typically have a penchant for interfering in other people’s matters. Specifically mine.”

Dante can’t help but raise a brow, feeling himself relax as he does his best to face his brother without disturbing Nero. 

“Yeah? And who was it that sparked our family reunion in the first place? You came to steal my amulet and everything.”

“I hadn’t seen you in over a decade. I wished to know how you had progressed over the years.”

Dante looks around them, at Vergil’s place in his shop, with his brother no more powerful than he’d been when Dante had vowed to take him and his plans down.

“So how’d that turn out for you?”

Vergil lets out a quiet noise, something that could almost be mistaken for a dry laugh, his fingers adjusting the collar of his clothing, and Dante thinks that he maybe isn’t actually here, is stuck upstairs in a dream. He’s been more-or-less bantering with his brother for almost the entire day now, and his brother hasn’t immediately pushed him away at the mention of his earlier defeat.  

This is the closest that Dante’s been to Vergil since they were eight years old, and Dante is almost afraid to let the night come to an end. He feels his hands tremble slightly, so he places one delicately in Nero’s hair to hide the emotion in them, stroking kid’s fluffy locks. 

Vergil exhales softly, his posture losing some of its usual rigid tenseness as he links his hands together between his knees, the tip of his foot trailing lightly against the wooden floorboards beneath them.

“Well, if you will not ask, then I will. You were always a rather deep sleeper in our childhood--I doubt that Nero would have ever woken you up on accident, given how silently he moves.”

While Dante is pretty pleasantly surprised that Vergil is so actively trying to exchange conversation with him, he isn’t sure how much he should tell his brother. His recurring nightmares aren’t something he likes to think about, and considering how Vergil is the star of most of them, he thinks it might be a little awkward to come out and say it.

“Got some pretty bad dreams running through my brain, lately. Makes it hard to sleep.”

Vergil eyes him carefully, his gaze oddly understanding. He nods once, leaning back against the cushions and turning his eyes upwards, to the ceiling.

“I find that Nero’s company tends to help with such things.”

Dante feels a crooked sort of grin come across his face, neither of them looking directly at each other. 

“So you too, huh?”

He can’t see his brother’s expression, but the shift in Vergil’s posture betrays his slight discomfort.

“Perhaps.”

Dante wonders, for a wild moment, if Vergil’s dreams are maybe similar to his, if Vergil dreams of a world where Dante’s hand misses his and he’s allowed to fall to his freedom and possibly his death. For Dante, it’s definitely a nightmare, one that he can’t stop seeing, no matter what he does. 

But for Vergil, maybe it’s a wish. 

He drags his hand down over his face and looks at the top of Nero’s head again, trying to put these sorts of thoughts out of his mind. Vergil is right--Nero is an especially effective distraction, his warm smiles and adorable behavior making it all too easy to narrow the world down into a peaceful, happy sort of place between the two of them.

The kid isn’t awake to play peacemaker between the two of them, but he and Vergil need to learn how to develop on their own, anyway. 

Dante digs into his own memories and tries to touch on the parts of his life where he’d felt the most natural with his brother, his fingers tangling idly in the soft down of Nero’s hair. 

“Hey, Verge,” he says quietly, turning his head to look at his brother, only to find that Vergil is already facing him.

“Want to settle the score? I think you still owe me a proper fight--and not one on some crumbling piece of architecture.”

Vergil tilts his head, the shadow of a smile crossing his face and his muscles tensing as he smoothly stands up. He brushes past Dante without a word, disappearing into his room and reemerging with Yamato in his hands. 

“Is it really a true battle if nothing is at stake?”

“Knew you’d say that,” Dante laughs, unwinding his arm from Nero’s side and gently laying the kid down, moving the pillow that Nero had fluffed up for him earlier underneath the boy’s head.

“If you win, I’ll eat a whole bowl of that disgusting cereal.” 

His brother certainly looks interested now, highly entertained at the prospect of watching Dante be smothered underneath a terrible, sugary death.

“As for what I get if I win...I’ll leave that up to you.” 

Vergil raises a brow contemplatively, tapping Yamato’s sheathed blade against the floor. 

“If you win, I will tell you the exact nature of the dreams that keep me awake.”

Dante summons his own blade, Rebellion’s hilt materializing in his palm, the metal strong and smooth against his skin.

“That’s a pretty steep price, Verge. You sure are confident in yourself, huh?”

Vergil actually smiles this time, his thumb pressing up against the circular edge of Yamato’s guard, the faint shine of the metal of the blade catching in the dim light.

“I told you already, Dante. I won’t lose.”

Dante checks on Nero again, watching the faint flutter of Nero’s bangs against his face as he turns in his sleep and buries his upper half into the pillow, wrapping his arms around it like a baby koala. The kid’s fast asleep, mostly content, and he and Vergil have got all night to start sorting out their leftover issues.

Everyone’s satisfied, then.

A spectral blade flies past his ear, barely grazing the edge of his skin and shattering before it can actually damage anything inside of the shop, a nonverbal cue to move things outside before Vergil’s patience can expire.

Dante grins, narrowly dodges the next projectile with a well-placed movement towards the outside of the shop, and the fight begins. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok i am SORRY this took many 14 hundred thousand years pls excuse my GROTESQUE lack of updates  
> baby newo loves u  
> i must WARN U....all the tags that apply to this fic are starting to come into play in this chap, so just in case 
> 
> tw: minor child abuse/harm, panic attacks, very vague underage non-con implications

“So this has been productive,” Dante says, approximately three seconds before he loses motor function in his limbs altogether and collapses onto the empty street in exhaustion.

Their so-called sparring match has easily taken them some ways away from the shop, into a mostly empty and abandoned street, with the area completely clear at this time of night. Most sane people weren’t too fond of wandering around in the middle of the night, with everything that went down in this particular city, so he and Vergil have pretty much had the whole metaphorical playground to themselves.

The complete absence of anyone else is probably a good thing, because Dante has honestly forgotten how destructive he and Vergil tend to get, even when they’re only sparring. It makes sense--Vergil never does anything in halves, always funneling his efforts completely into the task at hand with a single-minded focus, for better or worse. 

Dante isn’t quite so eager to push himself to the extremes, but he’s always enjoyed a good fight, has always been more reckless than necessary, and it’s pretty rare that he actually has a good challenge when he’s just mopping up the regular demonic lackeys out on his routine jobs. 

With some effort, he turns his head towards his brother, who is barely sitting upright, leaning heavily against the nearby brick wall, Yamato laying unsheathed on the concrete next to him.

Vergil struggles to catch his breath, a victorious sort of smirk crossing his features before his face quickly lapses into something like neutral exhaustion. He makes a feeble attempt to raise a hand to his hair and slick back the loose strands that have fallen into his face, but his hand trembles so hard along the way that he eventually drops it back to his side, leaning his head back against the wall.

“Indeed,” he agrees, his voice somewhat more subdued than normal, and Dante thinks that he maybe closes his eyes for a second too long when he blinks.

“It seems that I am victorious, once again.”

Dante snorts, somehow summoning the energy to fold his hands behind his head as he makes himself comfortable, lounging happily against the concrete in this admittedly uninhabitable alleyway with his half-awake brother. 

Sure, he was laying on the ground while Vergil was barely sitting upright, but Dante doesn’t really consider it as Vergil’s win. His twin had most definitely lost control of his exhausted muscles a millisecond or two before Dante had, so really, Dante was clearly on top in this situation.

“Oh, no. This right here--this is me giving you a break. Didn’t think you could stay standing much longer on those stick legs of yours, honestly. You really gotta work on all of...this.”

In a shaky motion, Dante bends one of his still-numb legs and nudges the edge of Vergil’s thigh with the tip of his boot. His brother gives him a fairly disgusted look at the action, but doesn’t so much as twitch underneath the gesture, much to Dante’s surprise. Either Vergil was just as tired as he looked and Dante felt, or maybe his brother was learning to tolerate more of his presence. 

“You are ridiculous, Dante,” Vergil answers evenly, before shifting his gaze to Yamato next to him, as if contemplating picking the blade back up.

“And deluded. If you so strongly believe that you can beat me, then, by all means, let us continue. I can still fight.”

Dante grins at the familiar sound of his brother’s stubbornness, equally eager to get back into things. He might not be able to feel any of his extended appendages--or the entire lower half of his body, for that matter--but that really wasn’t so much of a problem, in Dante’s mind. The rush of adrenaline hasn’t quite left his system yet, and his form crackles with red electricity, a pulse of energy rippling over his skin and sluggishly attempting to repair the wounds that Vergil’s left on him, his demonic resources largely drained by their hours spent fighting.

“You never know when to give up, yeah?”

Vergil frowns in distaste at him, before tossing his head and reaching unsteadily for his sword, his fingers wrapping around the hilt and his knuckles pressing themselves firmly against the ground as he slowly hauls himself to his feet, with the help of the wall. Dante copies the motion, ignoring the dizzying rush that standing up gives him, materializing Rebellion in his hand against and planting it blade first into the ground, leaning against it as a sort of crutch.

The two of them stay like that for a long moment, with each passing second making it increasingly obvious that neither of them are very fit to continue. But there’s a lot at stake here--his pride, his chance to pry into his brother’s emotional state, everything that was good and holy and not a bowl of Kwazy Krispies, the real important stuff. 

“...So,” Vergil grits out through his clenched teeth as he presses himself up against the wall so heavily that Dante thinks he might actually crack the brick behind him. 

Dante nods in acknowledgment of his brother’s single syllable, before making a valiant attempt to heft Rebellion over his shoulders in a display of his remaining strength.

It doesn’t quite work. 

In fact, it has quite the opposite effect, the gesture unbalancing his already unsteady legs and forcing him to lean against the same wall that Vergil is clinging to for dear life, with Rebellion’s blade finding itself embedded deeply into the concrete underneath them.

“...So,” Dante echoes, before huffing out a tired laugh, meeting his brother’s determined gaze.

“You think we should press pause on this? Pick up where we left off later?”

Vergil’s lips press together in a thin line as the tension in his trembling muscles appears to slightly relax, and he nods stiffly, before abruptly dropping back to the ground. Dante feels himself sigh in relief as he topples over as well, free to admit exactly how bad off he is now that they aren’t competing anymore. 

He ends up more or less next to his brother, lying down again and making himself comfortable, occasionally wincing as his sore muscles and bruises touch against the cold pavement. At least he’d gotten into the habit of properly wearing shirts again, thanks to Nero’s presence, so most of his upper half is spared from the normal sort of treatment it’d get.

This isn’t exactly number one on his list of places to relax, but somehow, he feels oddly at ease like this, basking in the afterglow of a good spar, the world narrowed down to just the two of them. Vergil doesn’t seem as tense as he usually is, probably less preoccupied with his thoughts after all the commotion of their fight, and their physical exhaustion gives the both of them an easy excuse to stay together like this.

He mostly focuses on the night sky above him, taking a rare moment to blink up at the stars, his gaze occasionally straying towards his brother, who has his eyes shut and his face arranged in its usual carefully blank expression. Vergil’s breathing turns deep and even, and Dante studies the dark circles underneath his brother’s eyes, wondering if he’s fallen asleep.

Dante can’t exactly blame him, nor can he feel like he’s beaten Vergil in this avenue--unlike Dante, Vergil had apparently stayed up all night with Nero, and hadn’t slept prior to their match. It probably made things a little unfair and tilted the odds in Dante’s favor, but his brother is a hell of a fighter, no matter what condition he’s in.

“This is familiar,” Vergil murmurs without opening his eyes, so softly that Dante isn’t entirely sure that he was meant to hear it. 

He doesn’t answer right away, just in case, but at his extended silence, Vergil cracks open an eye and tilts his head down to look at him, a wry smile curving at one corner of his lips. There’s something almost fond flickering in Vergil’s eyes, and Dante thinks that it’s been a long time since he’s seen Vergil with his guard truly down like this. His brother’s definitely been more prone to opening up in recent days--something to do with Nero’s angelic witchcraft, undoubtedly--but in this moment, there’s no trace of the usual composure that Vergil holds about himself.

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten? Or perhaps you repressed the memory of our childhood battles due to the terrible shame of your defeat?”

“You know, I’m starting to think that you and I remember our childhood very differently,” Dante chuckles, but the memory surfaces in his mind anyway.

They’ve had a lot of practice fights over the course of their childhood, but from context, he guesses that Vergil is probably referring to a rather specific incident in which they’d snuck out in the middle of the night, determined and eager to impress their father with a newly acquired grasp on a skill he’d taught them earlier in the day. 

It’d been Dante’s idea, because most things were his ideas back then, the majority of them characteristically stupid and reckless, and Vergil always went along with his plans even if he disapproved.

They’d been a little too young to understand the limits of their own strength at the time, especially fueled by how invincible they’d thought they had been, still riding on the new discovery of their accelerated healing. With this sort of childish determination in mind and their practice swords in their hands, they’d sparred themselves into near collapse, ending up rather stranded on the top of one particular hill, lying helplessly on the grass as their bodies struggled to recover from the exertion.

There hadn’t been much to do while they’d waited for morning to come and for their father to find them, and they’d been a little too sore and still energized from the fight to sleep, so they’d mostly passed the night by talking, something that had been pretty rare for them, even back then.

Now that they’re over a decade older and hanging out in some shady alleyway, staring up into the night, things really haven’t changed with them.

They know their own strength now, at least, but for both him and Vergil, having a better awareness of their limits really just meant having a better grasp of how to push themselves far past them.

“You were real chatty back then, actually,” Dante continues, because now that they’re on this track, he can’t help but want to push a little further, just to see how far Vergil will open up to him.

“We even had a whole conversation that night--pretty impressive when we could barely even stay in the same room together without getting into a fight.”

“The blame of said fights lies squarely upon you. As I recall, only one of us was disproportionately possessive over the last scoop of ice cream in the fridge.” 

“Uh, yeah, but only one of us kept the whole house up at night by reading self-written poetry aloud when we thought the other was asleep. I think I still remember some of the verses, actually--what was it again? Something about ‘the grace divine of the feline mine?”

“This is why our childhood was fraught with tension, Dante,” Vergil snaps quickly, cutting him off as Dante prepares to recite more of the memorized lines from seven-year-old Vergil's “Elegy of the Cat.”

His brother’s blank mask is tinted with embarrassment, but there’s little real force behind his tone, and if Dante didn’t know any better, he’d say that Vergil is actually  _ smiling. _

Vergil tips his head downwards, his stray strands of hair falling into his eyes with the motion, and an almost gentle look softens the edges of his expression. 

“Still, your utterly barbaric tendencies aside, I admit that those were more...peaceful times.”

Dante feels his own smile turn slightly sad, a bitter and familiar sort of ache welling up inside of him. He’s used to the sensation of missing what they never got to have, of the old life that no longer quite belonged to him, and he’s never been particularly fantastic at dealing with it. 

Taking on a new name and a new identity had helped, but in the end, he just couldn’t run away from who Dante was and is. 

Over the years, he’s figured out that pushing these types of thoughts down and shutting them away is pretty much the best way to avoid feeling things, but with his brother here and with the two of them raising Nero, he’s been finding himself dragging up these types of memories more often than not.

“Yeah,” he breathes out, his voice edging on a sigh, thinking of lonely nights and missing pieces.

“Sorta wish we could have stuck together, you know?”

Vergil looks suddenly uneasy at this declaration, and Dante feels something twist anxiously inside of him, jerking him back from this train of conversation. He’s convinced that he’s overstepped, or at least made Vergil uncomfortable enough to raise his guard again, and he can’t help but wonder if it’s because Vergil still resents him for stopping him from going through with his plans to jump into hell. 

His brother had been so dead set on going ahead and leaving the human world behind, so Dante honestly wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t too eager to echo Dante’s sentiment.

“I mean, in general. With our parents and stuff,” he hastily adds, clumsily trying to cover for himself.

Vergil doesn’t look very reassured by his follow-up statement--if anything, his expression turns a little more severe, the curve of his lips tilting downward in a barely noticeable shift in emotion.

“That is...a sensible wish,” Vergil concedes somewhat stiffly, looking very much as if he wants to say more, but doesn’t, either too prideful or too stubborn to allow himself to give in.

Dante eyes his brother for a long moment, mentally calculating the risks of pushing forward on a thing like this. A week ago, he wouldn’t even have considered it, but with Vergil’s blank expression actually betraying enough uncertainty to be visible, he can’t help but think that things have maybe changed. 

“Surprised to hear you saying that about any of my ideas. You used to shoot the stuff I came up with down all the time.”

“Yes, because your old ideas included jumping off of the roof of our house in order to ‘test’ the extent of our healing.”

“Which you agreed to do, by the way.”

“Regrettably so.”

Vergil looks relatively amused, despite his words, and Dante studies his face, waiting until his brother looks relaxed enough to continue. 

“Look, I know I sort of...dragged you back here and interrupted whatever plans you had for your own future, and I know we have Nero now and everything, but...I hope you get that you really don’t have any obligation to stick around. If this whole living situation isn’t really on your agenda, then…”

He trails off when he hears his brother shift next to him, with Vergil brushing off his coat before he gently eases himself further downwards, until he’s actually laying next to Dante, keeping his gaze trained on the sky above them. Dante stills beside him, his breath catching in his throat, and when he blinks, the two of them are kids again, the concrete underneath their backs turning to soft, yielding grass and the world around them condensed into this one moment between them.

“This current situation is certainly not what I would have imagined for myself in the past. But its unexpected status does not make it undesirable, exactly.”

Dante can’t help but chuckle at the stilted tone of his brother’s admission, but he feels his chest warm at the reaffirmation, all the same. Vergil’s a stone-cold asshole most of the time, but he does have his charm.

“Of course, there is also the matter of you being completely useless in raising Nero. It would be absolutely inhumane to leave the child in the care of a buffoon such as you.”

Of course.

Dante grins, shutting his eyes and tilting his head away from his brother’s side.

“You just had to ruin the moment, yeah?”

Vergil doesn’t bother to dignify him with a response, letting out a quiet scoff in return. The silence drapes comfortably around Dante, who feels weirdly relaxed, despite literally having a slab of concrete as his current bed. Behind his closed eyes, he can still sense the persistence of light, his senses aware of the slowly rising dawn, and he dimly realizes that they’ve been out here for a lot longer than he’d thought.

_ Ah, shit. Nero,  _ he thinks foggily, remembering that the kid was probably still right where they’d left him, curled up on the couch of the shop. 

Nero’s proven himself to be an early riser, no matter how many naps he has to take to get through the day or how late he sleeps, and Dante can’t imagine that waking up alone in an empty shop would be something that a kid as young as Nero could simply take in stride.

“We should really get back,” he says aloud, or at least he thinks he says, but his body doesn’t quite cooperate, his mind slowly being dragged into the folds of sleep, gently shoving his worries about Nero to the side. 

He’s always been a deep sleeper, and despite the many issues with their current situation, Dante finds himself hard-pressed to resist the pull of unconsciousness, the light soreness in his muscles turning his limbs to lead.

Before he actually passes out, he thinks he hears Vergil move beside him, and then his brother’s voice, quiet and faintly amused, but Dante’s brain is a little too far gone to actually process the words. There’s a light pressure against his upper back, and then Dante loses himself all together.

When he comes back to awareness, he doesn’t feel like his situation has changed much at first, except that he’s slightly warmer, and his skull isn’t pressed up right against the concrete. He feels more like he’s coming out of a coma than actual sleep, with his mouth and throat painfully dry and his head feeling vaguely like it’s been stuffed with cotton.

He barely bites back a groan as he forces his eyes to open, and is confronted with two very distinct facts.

The first being that he’s back inside of his own shop, laying on his back on the downstairs floor. The second, being the subsequent conclusion to that, is either that he sleepwalked here, or Vergil dragged his sleeping ass over and dumped him unceremoniously on the ground.

And here he’d been beginning to think that Vergil was growing some semblance of human decency. 

There’s a pillow under his head, though, and a blanket from upstairs draped across his body, and Dante turns his head in an attempt to survey his surroundings. He doubts that this is Vergil’s doing, since his brother was apparently more than content to leave him on the floor, but, with the very limited pool of residents in the shop, this left only two candidates.

The couch is empty, vacated of Nero’s presence, with only Dante’s own coat resting on of the cushions, neatly folded up by whoever had taken it off of him. He hears a soft scraping sound from the other side of the room, and when he looks towards it, squinting against the light filtering in through the window, he can see the top of the kid’s fluffy head.

Nero is struggling to push one of the kitchen chairs across the room, stopping every few inches to take a break. The chairs are pretty shitty things, aren’t exactly the sturdiest or the heaviest, but each one is about two-and-half times Nero’s size. 

Dante’s first instinct is to get up and help him, but Nero hasn’t noticed that he’s awake yet, and he’s admittedly curious to see how this plays out.

With a massive amount of effort, Nero makes his destination clear, pushing the chair right up next to the armchair that Vergil was laying in, still dead to the world, his hands still curled around the sheathed Yamato in his sleep. Dante slowly puts together the pieces of their sleeping arrangement--Vergil had brought him in here, had probably seen that the couch was still taken by Nero sleeping form, and had deciphered that there was only one viable location left to sleep that would still keep the two of them downstairs and out in the open, in case Nero needed them. 

So he’d left Dante on the floor, and taken the chair for himself, which is probably what Dante gets for being the first one to fall asleep.

Nero looks up at his work, biting hesitantly on his lip, before he waddles back to the other side, disappearing behind the couch. He re-emerges a moment later, with his arms completely full as he unsteadily escorts a blanket and a pillow over to Vergil’s location. The kid is so tiny that he can’t even see over the top of his bundle, taking slow, uncertain steps towards the kitchen chair before tossing both items onto it.

He follows the items soon afterward, his new vantage point on top of the chair leaving him able to actually reach Vergil as he tries his hardest to spread the blanket over him, even reaching over to tuck Vergil in at the edges. As a finishing touch, he picks up the pillow in both of his hands and gently slots it into the crook of one of Vergil’s arms, giving the man something to hold onto in his sleep.

The unconscious Vergil actually seems to  _ like  _ it, holding it closer to his body and nestling up with it, Yamato dropping from his hands and onto the floor with a soft noise.

Nero looks immensely pleased with himself at his finished project, very tenderly reaching out and brushing Vergil’s bangs out of his face with a tiny nod, before climbing down from his chair.

“Nice job, kid,” Dante praises once Nero safely climbs back down to the ground, clearing his throat against the sudden dryness, carefully sitting up and feeling the residual ache in his body.

Nero jumps in surprise at the sound of his voice, but looks fairly happy to see Dante awake, immediately running towards him with his arms outstretched. Dante wraps the kid up into a hug a second later, ruffling his fluffy hair beneath his hand, warmth automatically flooding him at the contact. The kid’s got some weird brand of magic, he swears, to be able to induce this same impossibly fuzzy feeling in Dante with nearly everything he does. 

“Sorry for sleeping in on you, but it seems like you managed to handle stuff on your own just fine.”

Nero pries his face away from Dante for a second to deliver unto him a truly kind smile, his expression turning a little shy as he taps at Dante’s chest, squirming out of the hug. Dante lets him go with some reluctance, mostly because Nero is ridiculously nice to hug, watching curiously as Nero hurries over to the kitchen table, climbing onto one of the chairs and picking up one of the plates in both of his hands. 

Dante remains partially on the alert, prepared to catch Nero if he should fall. Logically, he knows that Nero will be fine—the kid managed to almost outspeed him and leap between building rooftops during their meeting. But now that he’s gotten to know Nero and properly appreciate how sweet and innocent, his personality somehow makes him seem even tinier and more fragile in Dante’s eyes, like he desperately needs to be protected. 

Which, given Nero’s apparent past, is absolutely true.

Nero returns to him with the plate in his hands, very shyly holding it out to him. 

Dante takes it from him gently, realizing what he’s looking at. Nero’s made him a sandwich, of sorts—or at least a credible imitation of one. The slices of bread are stacked neatly on top of each other, though the strawberry jam is rather unevenly spread, and the top of the sandwich is somewhat flattened.

“This is for me?” He asks, checking with Nero, just in case.

Nero shyly ducks his head, twisting his tiny hands in front of him worriedly, the long sleeves of his shirt hanging over his fingers. He nods hesitantly, his gaze flickering from between the sandwich and Dante’s face as he nervously anticipates his reaction.

Then, after a pause, in which Dante is left staring at the sandwich, trying his hardest to contain the enormous wave of emotion that Nero’s ridiculously kind heart is currently giving him, Nero perks up, dashing off again. There’s some shuffling, along with the sound of running water, before Nero presents a glass of water to him to go along with his sandwich. 

Ah,  _ fuck. _

Dante gently reaches out with one hand, transferring the plate to the other and slightly tugging Nero closer, leaning down and pressing a kiss against the kid’s forehead. Nero flushes underneath the attention but settles himself comfortably into Dante’s side, looking up at him with wide eyes.

“Seriously, Nero, you gotta share your secrets. How’d you get so cute?”

Nero stares up at him in wonder, before curiously pointing to himself with an innocent tilt of his head, and Dante actually laughs then, petting Nero on the head again. 

“Yeah, I’m talking about you. So you saw me and Verge asleep and worried we might be hungry?” 

Nero confirms his query, which is all the encouragement that Dante needs to take the water from Nero, downing it quickly so that he can actually take a bite of his sandwich without choking on the dryness of his own mouth. 

It really is just two slices of bread with strawberry jam between them, but somehow, Dante thinks it might possibly be the best thing he’s ever tasted. 

“It’s great, kid. Really. How’d you figure this out?” Dante questions around his mouthful of bread, because a day ago, Nero hadn’t even known what bread was. 

Nero chews on his lip thoughtfully, probably thinking over the best way to convey his answer, since it wasn’t actually a yes or no question. Dante finishes off his sandwich as he watches Nero move over to the couch, climbing up onto it and unfolding Dante’s coat, digging around in the pockets and unearthing a slip of paper.

He recognizes it as the piece of paper with the doctor’s phone number on it, and he looks at it in confusion for a moment as Nero holds it out to him before he thinks he gets what he’s trying to say.

Nero doesn’t talk, so he couldn’t have called the number himself, and he doesn’t seem to know what the information on it is either, so Dante doubts that the actual contents of the paper are relevant in what Nero wants to say.

“Are you, uh...you’re saying that Lady told you how when she came over yesterday?”

He vaguely recalls that she’d spent a while talking to Nero on the couch the other day, but hadn’t really been listening in at the time. Dante suspects that Lady, correctly guessing that neither he nor Vergil would be of any functional use in the kitchen, had taught Nero how to make something he could do on his own. 

“Well, it seems like it paid off. You did pretty well—you gonna give one to Vergil when he wakes up?” 

He spares another glance to his brother, who has all but curled himself around the pillow that Nero had given him, and he belatedly realizes that Nero had gone through the effort to take off his coat, too, as well as both of their shoes, likely in an effort to make them comfortable. It’s honestly impressive how much thought and care Nero’s put into this little moment, and something bitter in Dante questions how Nero can know to do this when clearly no one’s ever cared like this for him. 

Nero nods, looking at Dante as if the answer should be obvious.

“Hey, he dropped me on the floor—maybe he doesn’t deserve one after all, yeah? You can give his to me.”

Nero gives him a scandalized sort of look, shaking his head insistently at him, and Dante laughs, properly chastised by Nero’s expression of tiny outrage on Vergil’s part. He holds up his hands in a placating gesture as Nero continues to look defensive of Vergil’s sandwich rights, but it’s pretty hard to take the kid seriously when his face is so adorably chubby with his cheeks puffed out.

“Alright, alright, Verge can keep his sandwich. There’s such a thing as being  _ too  _ nice, you know.”

Nero doesn’t seem very convinced by this last statement, shrugging off Dante’s half warning and cuddling further into him. Dante shifts so that he can rest against the bottom half of the couch, his gaze drifting to Vergil’s sleeping form as he curls his hand in Nero’s hair. His brother looks more relaxed that Dante’s ever seen him, peaceful in his exhaustion-induced sleep, and part of Dante wonders if he shouldn’t just challenge Vergil to a spar every night, if it meant getting him to sleep this well.

Then again, that would also require a spectacularly disastrous amount of work for Dante himself, and he’s never been the most proactive kind of guy.

After a moment, Nero twists around to look at him and curiously holds up the paper again, this time probably inquiring about the number written on it. The kid doesn’t seem to be too familiar with the concept of phones, so Dante doesn’t blame him for being confused over what just looked like a long sequence of numbers to him.

“Oh, that?” 

He takes the slip of paper from Nero, who obediently drops his hands back in his lap as he tilts his head all the way back to look up at Dante with an expectant gaze. 

“It’s a phone number. Sorta complex if you don’t know what phones are--we might get into that later, once Vergil’s awake. I’m a crap teacher, really. But anyway, it’ll let me get in touch with a doctor.”

The befuddlement on Nero’s face doesn’t change, so Dante suspects that Nero doesn’t quite know what one of those is, either.

“Never been a doctor?” He asks, with a mild amount of surprise as Nero shakes his head uncertainly. 

He remembers the way that Nero had been dressed during their first encounter, in that white hospital gown--maybe the kid  _ had  _ been in a hospital and around doctors and just hadn’t known what they were called?

“Huh. Well, basically, if you’re sick or hurt, you go see one of these, and they try and make you better, is probably the best way I can put it.”

Nero’s expression shifts to something like alarm as he suddenly wiggles off of Dante’s lap, twisting around to face him and starting to worriedly check him over, his tiny hands fluttering unsurely over Dante’s body. When he finds no evidence of injury on Dante’s person, with Dante’s wounds well healed over by now after his rest, Nero immediately turns in Vergil’s direction, clearly about to inspect him in the same way. 

“Hey, wait,” Dante says lightly, curling his fingers in the back of Nero’s shirt and very gently tugging him backwards, feeling his own smile turn slightly sad.

“I’m not hurt, and neither is Vergil. The reason why I have this number is, uh...well, we were hoping to get you looked at, honestly.”

Nero goes very still underneath his hand, to the point where Dante slowly removes his hands from the boy’s person, just in case. The kid drops his gaze down to the floor nervously, bringing his hands up to his chest in an almost defensive position as he curls in on himself, staring with renewed interest at a spot next to his foot. It’s always hard to watch the way that Nero retreats into himself, somehow having mastered the art of further silencing himself when he was already mute. 

Another one of those sensitive subjects, then.

Dante’s had his suspicions for a while now, having been unable to shake off the little details starting to come together. He’s in no way familiar with human hospitals or their normal practices, but the code on Nero’s neck--IV3170--Dante can’t think of anything else it could be, other than maybe an ID number. 

He’s not in any position to start prying into Nero’s past, though, not with the way the kid is still reacting to any mentions of it, and Dante thinks it might be a good idea to share his halfway-formed theories with Vergil first, before he actually went and did anything with them. Dante’s been getting a lot less impulsive, after all, at least when it comes to Nero--his brother would be proud.

“I’m guessing you aren’t too enthused about seeing one of these guys?”

Nero is quite visibly clamming up before his eyes, nearly wilting into a tiny ball as he avoids Dante’s gaze. Over the days, Dante’s figured out pretty easily that Nero’s an awful liar, and whenever confronted with a situation like this, Nero’s first instinct is to evade and run away.

Dante shifts slowly in place, leaning back and pressing his hands behind him on the floor, hoping to give Nero a sense of security, of sorts, the knowledge that he could easily physically escape this conversation if he actually wanted to. Nero doesn’t take the opening, though, staying frozen to his spot, evidently determined to see things through despite the trembles starting to run through his smaller frame.

After a pause, Nero hesitantly shakes his head in response to the question, biting anxiously at his lip, his fingers playing with the sleeves of his shirt.

Dante swallows, almost as unsure as Nero looks, and he finds himself instinctively looking towards Vergil’s collapsed form in the armchair for some semblance of reassurance. His brother is of no help, of course, but his actual existence in the room somehow makes Dante feel a little less unsettled about the uncertainty of the situation.

“Okay--I get it. This whole thing probably seems really scary to you. And I won’t lie to you--Vergil and I think it’s pretty necessary for you to get checked out. We don’t really know much about this area, and if something is actually up, it’d be our faults for not getting you seen sooner.”

Nero watches him with wide eyes as Dante straightens up a little further as he speaks, carefully moving his hands back in front of him, trying to avoid startling the kid.

“We’d never force you into anything that you don’t want for yourself, but...you’re a smart kid. I think you know it isn’t normal for those bruises and cuts you have to stay unhealed for so long.”

Dante is careful to keep his tone as neutral as possible, to present Nero with as much of a choice as he possibly can. This sort of free agency is important, especially when Nero probably hasn’t had much of it in the earlier years of his life.

Nero blinks at him for a minute longer, but eventually, he gives a tiny nod, and Dante sees the kid’s steps stumble slightly as he shifts forward, pressing his face back into Dante’s chest, searching for some sort of affirmation from him. Dante keeps his movements gentle as he strokes the back of the kid’s head, but he feels the strawberry sandwich in his stomach turning to cement, his gut twisting with concern and frustration and worry.

The more he finds out about Nero, revealed through the kid’s nervous habits and behaviors, the more he realizes how little he and Vergil really know about him, and he wonders, not for the first time, how well-equipped they truly are to take on something like this. Nero isn’t just some kind of job or new project they’re taking on, he’s a human life, and if he and Vergil fuck up, Nero’s probably going to be the one who ends up paying the price for it.

He can’t exactly let Nero in on his doubts, though, if only because he doesn’t want Nero getting the wrong idea. The kid’s already been betrayed by pretty much everyone who was supposed to have cared for him in the past, and Dante doesn’t want Nero thinking that he and Vergil are ever going to give up on him, that they’re going to one day decide that he’s too much work and turn him away.

“Hey, kid,” he says aloud, both to distract himself and Nero, nodding towards Vergil’s form.

“He’s been sleeping for long enough, don’t you think? His schedule will get real fucked up if we just leave him like that--so you wanna do the honors of poking him awake? Trust me, if I go near him, he might actually bite me.”

Nero shoots him a look of confusion, pointing to the empty sandwich plate next to them, and Dante can’t help but laugh at Nero’s misinterpretation. 

“Yeah, you’re right--he doesn’t need to eat me, he’s got your sandwich. But he’ll be happier to see you, that’s for sure.” 

He gives Nero a gentle push against the kid’s back, and Nero nods eagerly, setting himself to the task of climbing up onto the chair and wiggling his way next to Vergil’s lap, trying to gently tug the pillow out of his arms.

Vergil frowns in his sleep, grumbling out loud and hugging the pillow closer, an image that Dante attempts to burn permanently into his mind as he stands up, brushing sandwich crumbs off of his pants, taking the slip of paper with him.

He’ll leave Nero to do damage control with an angry, sleep-deprived Vergil--Dante’s got a phone call to make.

 

* * *

 

“This the brat?” 

Instead of behaving like a normal person, the doctor pushes his way in without further preamble or introduction. Not that Dante would need one--he’d recognize this guy from fifty feet away with the way that the scent of smoke clings to his clothes and skin, irritating Dante’s heightened senses.

“Where’d you get something like him?”

Nero immediately shies away from his presence, especially when the man’s crooked grin turns in his direction, his gaze studying Nero’s form, and Dante greatly resists the urge to pull Nero back behind him, reminding himself that they didn’t have very many options.

“Vergil, stop  _ growling,” _ Dante hisses underneath his breath, nudging his brother none-too-gently in the side, hardly able to believe that  _ he’s _ the one having to school his brother in etiquette. 

Vergil’s stormy expression doesn’t dissipate as he continues to stand up straight against the wall, his arms folded across his chest and his eyes focused completely on Nero, his muscles tensed and prepared for movement.

Dante takes approximately three seconds to collect himself, running a hand through his hair and letting his usual easy, charming grin slide across his face, his “people-interacting” mask falling easily into place. He steps forward and closer to Nero, enough to let the kid cling to his leg nervously.

“He’s not ours, biologically, if that’s what you’re looking for. You just like getting straight to the point, huh?”

The doctor gives him a withering look, his lip curling in something like disgust. He’s shorter and less built than both him and Vergil, but he’s definitely got years on them, his scarred face hardened by his experiences in underground dealings.

“I don’t have a lot of time to  _ play _ \--I’m here because you promised cash, which I’m seriously doubting a couple of shits like you have even got.”

Dante doesn’t exactly consider himself a prideful person, but he can feel a low undercurrent of anger starting to burn through his veins at the way this human talks to them. He’s spent his life trying to rid himself of the idea that his biology made him any better than humans, but he knows that that side of him exists all the same, simmering underneath his skin, threatening to break free if Dante doesn’t control it properly. 

From behind him, he senses Vergil’s distrust for this human mold sharply into something like incredible disdain, and he resists the urge to drag his hand down over his face, trying to rein in the situation. This guy’s barely been here for two minutes, and things are already going very south.

“Yeah, well, don’t worry--we’ve got what you need. Will you look at Nero or not?”

He’d already explained the nature of his concerns over the phone, as well as the partial need for relative secrecy, but looking at this guy, he’s honestly not sure that any of his statements actually stuck with this man.

The guy thinks it over for a moment, studying the area around him with sharp eyes, probably evaluating the worth of everything in the shop and judging whether or not Dante actually had the capacity to pay him or not. With a sigh, Dante reaches into his coat pocket and extracts a neatly tied bundle of cash from it, waving it indicatively, not quite able to resist the mocking insinuation in his actions. 

The money does most of the convincing for him, and earns him a less-than-casual shrug, the man’s eyes now intently focused on the money.

“So a kid like you knows how to stay in the game after all, huh? Sure, then. Let’s get this over with--you don’t need my name, and I don’t need yours. The less we all know about each other, the better, if you’re trying to hide this kid like I think you are,” the man adds with a grin, and absolutely nothing about the new information they’ve gained does anything to put Dante’s mind to rest.

He feels a tug on his pant leg, and he looks down to see Nero gazing unsurely up at him, looking between him and Vergil for guidance. Vergil maintains his stony expression, indicating neither approval or disapproval as he tilts his head upwards and looks pointedly to the side.

So, essentially, Vergil hated this human’s guts, hated having this human intruding in what his demonic side probably considered to be his territory, but thought there was enough benefit in having him here to allow him to stay. 

Great.

“Hey, don’t worry, kid,” Dante tries reassuringly, bending down to pick Nero up and gently settling him down on the couch, where the doctor is already setting up, extracting various tools from his bag.

Nero eyes the silver instruments carefully, but he doesn’t seem to recognize any of them, none of his usual nervous behaviors kicking in, which is both a source of relief and further confusion to Dante.

“You gonna hover around him the whole time? Hard to do my job with vultures circling around, if you know what I mean.”

Dante is incredibly reluctant to move even an inch away from Vergil’s side, but Nero tilts his head up to look at him and gives him a nod of confirmation, indicating that he maybe wanted to try handling this himself. As far as Dante remembers, Nero isn’t too comfortable with any of them seeing the area underneath his clothes, anyway, so the fewer eyes on him, the better.

He gives Nero one last pat to the head before moving to join Vergil, unable to completely relax with the situation playing out in front of him. They’re definitely close enough that Dante could snatch Nero up if anything went wrong, but the fact doesn’t exactly do much to appease his concerns.

“Surprised you’re going along so easily with this,” Dante murmurs to Vergil, starting up a conversation more or less to take his mind away from the situation and maybe give Nero a little bit of privacy.

The two of them haven’t really talked over the decision to see a doctor much, with nothing going further than the conversations they’d had in the previous days and the occasion when Dante had made sure that Vergil’s mouth was full of disgusting marshmallow cereal first before telling him that a strange human was about to be coming into their shop. Vergil definitely isn’t happy about the situation, but he’s tolerated it far better than Dante had expected. 

Vergil’s blank expression threatens to collapse into an actual frown as he eyes Dante stiffly, eventually shifting his gaze back to Nero as he speaks.

“I would not have done this myself, in all honesty. But this is a decision you chose to make. And I...do not entirely see a reason to disregard your judgment.” 

Huh.

Dante accepts Vergil’s semi-admission for what it is, turning back into whatever the doctor is saying to Nero. The guy is poking none too gently at Nero’s throat, in a way that makes Dante curl his fingers into his palms, nearly hard enough to break the skin and draw blood. He indicates for Nero to open his mouth, and, with a nervous look in Dante and Vergil’s direction, Nero eventually complies.

“So, you’re sure he doesn’t talk? Maybe he just doesn’t talk to you, specifically?” 

Dante can feel the way that Vergil tenses up even further next to him, and he places an almost restraining hand against his brother’s arm.

“Yeah, why? Something wrong with his voice?”

“Not quite. Brat’s maybe a little fucked in the head, though. Most kids start talking at this age, you know?” 

Nero seems quite unaffected by the man’s words, looking neither as offended or as hurt as Dante would have been if he were Nero’s age, hearing these things being said about him. Something deeply uneasy twists in Dante’s stomach--maybe anger on Nero’s behalf, or maybe because he knows that this guy is right.

If nothing was actually physically wrong with Nero’s voice, then Nero’s muteness was indeed out of choice--or, more likely, out of trained habit. Dante doesn’t think that Nero’s development is actually stunted, given his displays of his true intelligence and his little reading sessions with Vergil, but he also seems to be quite comfortable going about life without talking, which Dante can’t imagine will benefit him in the long-term.

“Okay...so you’ve covered his voice. Move on,” Dante says impatiently aloud, because this isn’t exactly a topic that Dante wants to dwell on in the company of this human, and because Nero is getting especially fidgety as the doctor’s hands continue to prod at his neck.

The man slightly shifts the collar of Nero’s shirt, raising a brow when his gaze lands on the tattoo on Nero’s neck, and he gives another side-eyed glance in their direction, something more suspicious flickering across his face this time.

“I get it,” he says, which deeply concerns Dante.

“Guess it’s a good way to keep track of your, uh... _ merchandise, _ huh?”

Nero immediately flinches back at the term, his hand jerking upwards and slapping across his neck, covering up the tattoo as he shrinks back into the couch. He’s obviously heard the word before, and most definitely in relation to him, and Dante isn’t sure which of the two implications makes him angrier--that this shitty human would even imply something like this, or that it could potentially be true. 

“Do not address Nero in such a way,” Vergil finally deigns to speak, his hand straying to his waist and his fingers curling around empty air. 

His brother is thankfully restraining himself from summoning Yamato to his presence, but Dante isn’t sure how much further his own self-control can go, if this guy keeps poking around like this. 

“Sure. Just saying, I’m starting to think it’s worth a little more to keep your secrets hushed up, if you catch my drift.”

No part of Dante wants to reward this creep with even a single extra coin, but the man meets his gaze evenly, evidently well-practiced in the art of extracting money from his reluctant customers. With a grimace, Dante gives a cut-off nod, trying not to think of his precious pizza cash being funneled into this guy’s slimy hands. 

“Hurry it up, then,” he snaps, taking a few steps closer to Nero when he sees that the kid’s instinctive reaction hasn’t subsided, that he’s still pressing himself back into the couch and trying to make himself as small as possible, his hand firmly planted over the skin of his neck. 

The doctor shrugs, giving Nero another once over.

“I’m close to being done, anyway. As far as I can tell, the kid’s physically fine. He ain’t sick or anything--no fever, and his lungs are clear. Could stand to put on a little more weight, but I won’t bother to ask what you’re feeding him. Not my business, unless you’re looking for ways to up your resale value?”

“We are  _ not,” _ Dante interrupts, before Vergil can actually spring off of the wall and attack this man. 

“And what about the  _ one  _ thing I actually asked you to come here for? You figure that one out?”

“Oh, that? I’ll need some of his blood for that.” 

He reaches into his bag again, extracting a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a set of covered, disposable syringes.

Nero does not react well, to say the least. 

The kid fairly leaps off of the couch at the sight, jumping off of the edge faster than even Dante’s eye can track, looking very much like he’s about to bolt for the door. He moves forward before Nero can actually make a run for it, kneeling in front of his trembling form, alarmed to see the tears rapidly starting to gather in Nero’s eyes.

Vergil pushes himself away from the wall, unfolding his arms and starting forward like he wants to interrupt, but eventually decides to hang back in favor of keeping an eye on the human, who merely shrugs, looking very much as if he’s used to this sort of reaction.

“Hey, kid…” Dante starts, but his words stick themselves in his throat, because what the hell is he even supposed to say to someone who’s been through whatever Nero has?

He reaches out, keeping his movements slow and his hands where Nero can see them, gently taking one of the kid’s tiny hands in his own. Nero controls his flinch at the touch well, but keeps his eyes trained on the ground, biting his lip as his tears run down his face. 

“You don’t want to do this, then?” 

Nero hesitates, clearly understanding the importance behind what needed to happen, but not wanting to agree to it all the same. He spares a quick glance up at Dante, his eyes fearful in a way that Dante hasn’t seen since they’d first met the kid, and he feels his chest clench painfully at the sight as he lifts up a hand, using his coat sleeve to gently wipe at Nero’s face.

“Okay,” he concedes, because the sight of Nero’s tears have compromised him beyond anything else.

“Dante.”

Vergil’s voice quietly interrupts before Dante can go ahead and promise Nero anything, and when he looks up, Vergil’s lips are pressed into a thin line, his gaze pointedly avoiding Nero’s face. His brother gives him a curt flick of his head, indicating his desire to speak to Dante off in private.

“You mind if I come right back?” He asks Nero, who nods quietly in agreement, and Dante leans down, giving the kid a quick hug and another pat of the head before standing up.

“So you letting me do my job or what? I don’t care either way--less work for me, I guess.”

He’s about to answer the doctor, probably with a string of less than appropriate or amicable language, but Vergil evidently reaches the end of his patience, stepping forward and wrapping a hand around his arm, pulling him off to the side. They’re at a position in the room where they can keep an eye on both of the other occupants, where the doctor makes himself comfortable on their furniture and Nero continues to curl up in a terrified ball on the other side of the couch.

“What?” Dante demands of his brother, feeling the situation slip further and further out of his grasp.

“You have to convince Nero to agree.”

Dante blinks at his brother, searching his face carefully, but his brother keeps his expression quiet and neutral, and his eyes cold in an analytical sort of way. 

“Are you kidding? Just look at him!” 

He tries to keep his voice to a low whisper, which is hard to do when his natural protectiveness over Nero flares up in his stomach, protesting violently against the thought of giving Nero any more reason to cry.

“I  _ have  _ looked at him, Dante. And perhaps you haven’t done so enough, if you are so willing to let him go like this. Recall the nature of his injuries--the placement of the bruises on the insides of his legs--what if...what if he has some sort of human disease?”

Dante feels his heart abruptly stutter in his chest, a new kind of panic threatening to escape him at the notion. He hadn’t thought about that--or at least, he hadn’t  _ wanted  _ to think about such a thing. Nero’s already been through enough, and if it turns out that he’s stuck with the consequences of his abuser’s actions for the rest of his life, Dante isn’t so sure how long his faith in humanity plans to hang around. 

“We have to know,” Vergil insists, and Dante hates that his brother is correct, even as a part of him appreciates Vergil’s cold-blooded, rational thought process in a time like this.

Still, Vergil looks awfully hesitant about the whole thing, and with the way that he’s confronted Dante over this, Dante suspects that a part of Vergil’s heart is still too soft to take the necessary action of pushing Nero into doing something he absolutely fears. 

“He trusts you more.”

Vergil’s addition has the simultaneous effect of doubling Dante’s guilt and strangely reassuring him, somehow, and he turns to Nero’s direction with something like a sigh, returning to his side and gently carding his hand through Nero’s hair. The kid wipes at his face, looking up at him with wide, watery eyes, and Dante resists the urge to back out, reminding himself of the truth in Vergil’s words.

“Hey, Nero? Listen, I know it’s really scary, but Vergil and I really want to make sure you’re okay, yeah? And this might be the only way we get to find out. So...with your permission, we want to let this guy do this.”

He fully expects Nero to look betrayed, or at the very least, angry at him for appearing to so suddenly change his mind, but Nero only wipes at his eyes again, hiccuping in that unnatural, soundless way of his before he studies Dante’s face. Dante isn’t so sure what the kid is looking for, or what he actually sees, but whatever it is seems to give Nero some amount of courage as he faintly nods, biting down on his bottom lip to hide the tremble in it. 

“Thank you, Nero,” he says seriously, with equal parts relief and sadness, wishing that none of this was necessary in the first place. 

With Nero’s consent, he picks Nero up in his arms, placing him on the couch again and sitting down a couple of inches away from them, enough to give the doctor enough room to work, but also keeping himself close by in case anything went wrong.

“Took you long enough,” the man grumbles, but he seems vaguely enthused by the prospect of his job being almost complete, extracting the rest of the materials with efficiency.

Nero seems to already know the procedure by heart, rolling up his sleeve past the crook of his elbow and extending his arm without any prompting whatsoever, shutting his eyes tightly as his body trembles against his will. The doctor cleans the area off, ignoring Nero’s flinch as the coldness of the alcohol touches his skin, tying a band around his arm and poking around in the soft flesh of his arm in search of his vein. 

The kid seems to stop breathing altogether, his trembles subsiding in favor of complete petrification, and Dante watches him nervously, checking him over for his normal signs of panic. Nero seems awfully close to the edge, but he’s handling himself as well as he can for someone in his situation.

For the first few seconds, Dante thinks it might actually be going well.

Nero doesn’t open his eyes or move at all when the doctor properly grabs hold of his arm, tugging Nero a little closer to him in an effort to reach him better. But then the cold tip of the needle pricks against his skin, and the man’s other hand on Nero’s arm slides slightly upwards to get a better grasp, his fingers nearly brushing against Nero’s neck, and Dante can feel the change in the air, the way that Nero is rapidly starting to lose control of his own fear.

Nero’s muscles unfreeze themselves as he opens his eyes again, starting to try and squirm away, and Dante feels like he’s stuck in his dreams again, too slow to reach out and grab Vergil’s hand, too slow to reach out and stop Nero from moving, and too slow to stop Nero’s instinctive, panic-driven reaction when the needle slides in.

The kid jerks away, hard, his breathing starting to come in rapid and uneven pants, and when the doctor makes a frustrated sort of noise, grabbing the kid none-too-gently in an attempt to stabilize him, Nero twists in his grasp, turns his head, and bites down on the man’s hand, hard enough to draw blood.

It’s the first time that Dante’s ever seen Nero react with violence to  _ anything,  _ and maybe the sheer novelty of it is what freezes him in place, locking up his mind in his body and leaving him a helpless witness to the events that unfold next. Honestly, he’s not so certain he can really blame anyone but himself for this.

_ “Fuck!” _

The doctor, clearly neither very used to nor very fond of handling children, reacts on an instinct of his own as he dislodges Nero’s teeth from his bleeding hand, and he strikes Nero across the face hard enough to knock him off of the couch and onto the floor.

Dante doesn’t feel quite so attached to his own body, a quiet, unsettlingly tranquil sort of rage falling over his mind like a blanket, blocking out all other thoughts. He’s not sure what makes it all worse--maybe it’s the remorseless look of disgust on the man’s face, or maybe it’s the way that Nero so clearly expected the blow, flinching before impact and tumbling to the ground without a single noise of pain, or maybe it’s--

_ he trusts you more-- _

He isn’t too sure what happens between the point before this and the next, but when he blinks back into reality, his own hand—flickering with red energy, demonic scales creeping across his skin—is wrapped around the human’s neck, lifting him bodily off of the ground, a low, furious sort of snarl building up in the back of his throat. 

_ “Don’t you fucking touch him,” _ he hears his own voice say, warped and twisted in his throat, and the side of him that he struggles so hard to suppress boils through his veins in rage, demanding he take penance for this pitiful human’s crimes, for daring to intrude upon a being under Dante’s own protection.

The human’s pitiful fingers claw at Dante’s much stronger hand as he struggles for breath, his windpipe threatening to collapse underneath the strength of Dante’s grip, and Dante feels his own heartbeat in his chest, erratic and uneven, wildly uncontrolled against the fluctuating energy of his partial devil trigger form. From behind him, he distantly registers Vergil’s presence, identifies it as a friendly one, one joined in a similar goal as him, and Dante thinks that he grins, the sharp points of his teeth grazing against his hardening skin. 

He’s had more than  _ enough  _ of this human, and he’s sure that Vergil will agree, after all the insult they’ve been made to tolerate from him on this day. He feels the strength in his hand, the frantic fluttering of the human’s fragile pulse underneath his fingers--he doesn’t want to  _ kill  _ him, he’s still got enough of himself left inside of him to know that, but Dante really doesn’t see any reason as to why he shouldn’t maybe get himself a little discount on the price of this visit. 

A shudder of movement suddenly catches his attention, and Dante allows his gaze to drift to the side, where Nero is staring up at him, curled up in a ball on the ground, his hand pressed to his rapidly bruising cheek, tears gathering at his lashes. He’s looking at Dante like he’s never seen him before, fear and horror freezing him in place as he wilts underneath Dante’s attention, and Dante is abruptly shocked back to himself. 

He releases his grip on the man’s throat, letting him collapse to the ground with a series of coughs, his devil form automatically dispelling itself in the absence of the threat. The fear that he sees in Nero’s eyes only marginally decreases once Dante has assumed his human appearance again, and he doesn’t dare to move, doesn’t come forward towards him like he normally might have done.

“You are letting him go?” Vergil asks, his voice quiet and dangerous, edged with a calm rage, and Dante finds it in himself to nod, a sort of numbness creeping over him in a distant realization. 

Nero had probably thought the two of them were humans this whole time, and Dante had just gone and shown him that side of themselves at his lowest point, probably completely alienating Nero in the promise. 

“It’s for the best,” he mumbles in reply, groping around in the recesses of his mind for the sense of human mercy he’d taught himself to build up over the years, but somehow, he finds it rather difficult to do so for the man at his feet, unable to erase the image of his act against Nero from his mind. 

Vergil tries to start forward, but Dante steps in front of his brother, preventing him from going any further as he stares down at the human, very reluctantly tossing the bundle of cash next to his head.

“Get the fuck out of here.”

The man needs no other prompting, grabbing his possessions and the money and fleeing the scene without a second thought, leaving the three of them in silence.

As slowly as he can, Dante turns to Nero, who has been still with shock this entire time, and kneels in front of him, slowly reaching out.

“Nero--”

Nero jerks at the sound of his voice, looking between them with increasingly panicked motions. Then, before Dante can stop him--not that he tries to, after everything he’s done--Nero flinches away, stumbling backwards as tears prick at his eyes, and runs upstairs as fast as his tiny legs can carry him. A few moments later, they hear the distant thump of the door being slammed shut, probably from Nero throwing his body against it, and Dante allows his head to drop, his breath feeling like it’s been punched out of him.

“I cannot allow this to simply stand,” Vergil states, the killing intent in his voice quite clear as he stares down at the spot where the man had been laying not a few minutes ago.

There’s the quiet hum of energy as Yamato presumably appears in his hand, its sheathed blade tapping against the ground.

“Do not try to stop me.”

He walks past Dante’s kneeling form without another word, and somewhere in the back of his mind, Dante thinks that he should maybe stop his brother, should prevent him from straying back onto his human-killing path. After they’ve come all this way in Vergil’s gradual reformation and assimilation to society, a potential homicide, as well-deserved as it would be, would probably set their progress back by quite a bit.

But he can’t bring himself to move from this spot, unable to stop seeing Nero’s terrified eyes in his mind, the way the kid had fled from him like  _ he  _ was the most dangerous thing in Nero’s life. And as Dante presses his hand against the floor, his fingers digging into the light bloodstains starting to seep into the floorboards, he can’t help but think that, if that’s the way that Nero now thinks--

_ he trusts you more _

\--then Nero is right.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OOPS........I DIED  
> SDFHS im srry i DRIED UP like a cactus for the whole month of september and then fell into a sloth pit of despair afterwards but NOW....5 REWRITES LATER I HUMBLY OFFER U THIS  
> ty to FALT for inspiration and LUNA 4 proofreading and p much everyone who knows me for listening 2 me COMPLAIN
> 
> no new tw's in this chapter (i think) other than the ones that r already applied

Dante doesn’t remember what his first fight with his parents was about.

Maybe he’d let his mouth run a little too far in front of his father, or maybe he and Vergil had taken their bickering to an unacceptable level, or maybe he’d just wanted to stay up past his bedtime and eat Vergil’s ice cream. Whatever the reason, he remembers the way he’d reacted at least, his four-year-old self stung with the gravity of the perceived injustices against him.

Vergil had already been in the room by the time Dante had flung himself on top of his bed, their bedroom door firmly locked behind him. His brother had watched, in a mixture of curiosity and mild alarm as Dante buried his face into one of the pillows, venting his frustrations in a series of incoherent sounding noises, his words mostly swallowed by the layer of fabric against his mouth.

There’d been a knock on their door, and then their mother’s voice, gently amused and patiently understanding, drifted towards them.

Dante had tilted his head to the side to glare at his brother, freezing him in place from where Vergil had shifted off of his own bed, prepared to open the way up to their mother.

“I don’t want to,” Dante mumbled under his breath, his cheeks still flushed red with the strength of his emotion, something like a pout twisting at his features.

To this day, Dante isn’t sure why his brother had actually listened to him back then, settling back with a light shrug and reopening his book to the page he’d previously been on, content to read over the words in silence, the two of them separated from the world in the safety of their room. 

Dante had been a real brat back then, and once he’d actually gotten what he’d wanted, the storm had passed and his tantrum cleared right up. It’s a pretty embarrassing memory, but it’s one he holds onto anyway, because he remembers how it’d been afterward, how he’d pressed himself into his mother’s hug and hiccuped out his various grievances as she’d nodded along, her thin fingers brushing his bangs away from his face. 

Their mother had always had a real talent for listening to people, for turning situations around with only her words, and in all the time that they’ve been apart, Dante’s never missed this part of her more than he does now, ten years later and on the other side of the door.

Nero’s making a lot less noise than Dante did, but it doesn’t make the thought of the kid’s unhappiness any easier to stomach, though, and Dante sighs as he leans his head against the closed entrance of his own bedroom. 

He tentatively reaches downwards, testing the handle of the door, finding the resistance of the lock that he’d predicted. There’s no sort of natural light coming from the crack underneath the door, either, despite the fact that Dante’s bedroom is well-lit, the windows easily allowing the light of the middle of the day inside. 

If Dante’s assumption is correct, the kid’s really gone all out here, barricading himself up inside of the room and blocking off the entrance with whatever he could find--anything to put up another layer of defense between him and Dante, apparently.

The physical proof of Nero’s fear twists unpleasantly at his stomach, the guilt clawing away at the insides of his stomach, but there’s a low frustration simmering away somewhere beneath it, too. Dante doesn’t exactly want to dwell on that second emotion for too long, because it isn’t fair for him to be angry at the kid, not when Nero’s reaction is perfectly natural.

Dante had seen, once he’d properly pulled himself out of his momentary phase of self-pity, the fair amount of destruction he’d wrought on his own living room, with the furniture upended and objects cast to the ground, the area disrupted by the force of his sudden trigger. He’d definitely left an impression, both on the kid’s mind and on the floor, because there’d been an average-sized crater in the spot where he’d been standing, the splintered edges of the wooden floorboards dusted with ash and decorated with scorch marks.

Nero’s already proven himself to be justifiably skittish about loud noises and surprise occurrences, and watching his caretaker explode into a mass of scaly, demonic energy probably fell quite neatly under both of those umbrellas. Dante isn’t too sure how much of the workings of the demon world Nero’s been exposed to, but he can’t imagine that his trigger form is a pretty sight to anyone, much less a five-year-old kid. 

But another part of Dante can’t help the irritation he feels on his own end, the way their progress has been so rapidly washed away by this one mistake, and the longer he stands here, somewhat frozen with indecision on what to even say to Nero, the more he’s starting to realize how little he knows about this whole “raising-a-kid” business.

Dante’s nineteen, and his talents include being a demon, finding demons, killing demons, inhaling pizzas, and scaring children away. Exactly none of these are particularly conducive to raising another human being, and given the way his own childhood had been cut so abruptly short, he doesn’t exactly have the best frame of reference to go off of.

So he’s standing here, exiled from his own bedroom, trying to remember what his mother would have done and did do, over a decade of his life ago, and even then, he still finds himself coming up short. Not too many of his own childhood experiences really apply to this exact scenario, after all.

If his father had shown them his demon form, he and Vergil probably would have lost their shit, in the best sense of the phrase.

He can imagine the way they would have fawned over their father, climbing all over him in a desperate attempt to get a firsthand look at this new feature. Vergil would have studied Sparda’s form with something like a quiet determination in his eyes, eager and prepared to emulate him in whatever way possible while Dante would have added another line to his mental list of reasons of why their dad was coolest.

Nero’s different, though. Dante’s still got no idea where the kid had grown up, and unlike he and Vergil, who’d learned to fight and loved to fight, Nero’s shown absolutely no interest in doing anything other than being kind and adorable, which is not at all synonymous with demonic power.

With Dante as the actual source of the kid’s fear, Dante somehow doesn’t think his mother’s method will be all that effective in calming Nero down. But Vergil’s long gone, has already stalked off on his little one-man-parade, and Dante doesn’t exactly want to call Lady over for this kind of thing. 

Nero’s their responsibility, even if self-imposed, and if he goes and lets someone else handle the problem, he might never make things right with the kid.

Might as well quit stalling and get the party started, then.

Dante leans slightly back, dragging a hand down his face before he lightly knocks at the door.

From inside the room, he can hear the rapid rustling of cloth, accompanied by a muted thump as Nero likely startles from the noise, as quiet as it had been, which is a rather dismal indicator of how the rest of this interaction might play out.

“Uh...hey, kid,” he starts awkwardly, his words stumbling over each other and dragging slightly out as Dante tries to buy himself extra time. 

He shifts his weight between his feet, digging his hands into the pockets of his coat as he tips his head up towards the ceiling in thought, listening for further movement on the other side of the door. Nero seems to have been petrified after the first knock, though, waiting silently for Dante to continue.

“Okay...I’m not gonna force you to come out. But I do think we need to talk. Or at least, I gotta talk  _ at  _ you, if you’re willing to listen. Because this situation is pretty shitty, and I don’t like leaving things this way.”

His words aren’t particularly persuasive, even to his own ears, so the sound of tiny hands scrabbling at the latch on the door comes as a surprise to him. He hears wood scraping against wood, and then a faint sliver of light trickles out from under the door as Nero removes whatever obstruction he’d had pressed up against it.

The effort culminates in the door opening up by a fraction of an inch, and then Nero very slowly peeks out from behind it, his form trembling as he focuses in on Dante.

Looking at the kid’s face kind of feels like a punch to the gut, because there’s a dark purple, almost black handprint bruising against a good part of his right cheek, and the bottom of his lip is crusted with blood, a small cut from the kid’s teeth sluggishly clotted over. Nero’s eyes are wide and filled with a certain kind of resignation that Dante doesn’t like at all, and when the kid slowly shuffles out from behind the cover of the door, his gait is unsteady and off-balance.

He doesn’t get to look at Nero’s face for very long anyway, because Nero ducks his head, casting his gaze intently on the floor as he makes his way towards Dante, stopping right in front of his feet. The kid curls inwards, trying to make himself look as small as possible, his hands pressed uncertainly against his own chest, but he refuses to look up at Dante no matter what.

“Oh--uh, hey…” Dante starts, automatically starting to kneel down in order to get to Nero’s eye level, but at the movement, Nero violently flinches away, his eyes squeezing shut and his face turning to the side to expose his unbruised cheek to Dante. 

Dante immediately stops where he is, his knees pressed against the ground and his hand suspended in midair from where he’d been about to try and comfort Nero. With that option so clearly taken off of the table, Dante forces himself to retract his hand, pressing it flat against the ground instead.

“I’m not going to hit you, Nero,” he says quietly, a sort of helplessness lining his tone, and the frustration from before returns in force as Nero continues to remain tense and on edge, despite Dante’s reassurance.

It makes sense that the kid wouldn’t believe him, but the whole thing feels off all the same, because if everything that Dante’s done up to this point isn’t enough to convince Nero, then Dante isn’t sure what will. He doesn’t want to give up on Nero, but if the kid’s going to be afraid of him like this forever, then he’s better off sending Nero somewhere else, which is absolutely the last thing he wants to do.

So he stays perfectly still, studying Nero’s behavior as the boy slowly cracks open an eye, evidently confused about the lack of reaction on Dante’s part. Nero tilts his head carefully, eyeing Dante unsubtly, his teeth instinctively worrying at the unblemished part of his bottom lip.

“I just want to talk, I promise.”

Nero doesn’t look particularly convinced, but he doesn’t protest the notion either, repositioning himself so that he’s completely facing Dante again, his gaze trained on a particularly interesting crack in the floor. His hands come downwards to play nervously with the hem of his oversized shirt, his head cocked to the side to maybe indicate that he’s listening.

The lack of eye contact makes it rather difficult to tell whether or not Nero is actually receptive to his words or not, but Dante supposes that this is the closest he’ll get at the moment, so he presses on.

“I’m sorry, first of all. Today pretty much went to shit, and some of that is on me. Obviously, the guy shouldn’t have been an enormous asshole and done what he did, but...I sorta lost control of myself at the end and turned into...what you saw back there. Not good. I’ll talk more about that when Verge gets his ass back here, if you’re still up for it.”

He looks at Nero then, but the kid doesn’t react, and when Dante cranes his neck to catch a better glimpse of the boy’s face, the blue of Nero’s eyes is somehow distant and cloudy, like Nero isn’t all the way there.

The message that the boy is giving out, however unconsciously, is pretty clear, and Dante lifts a hand to run through his hair, deciding to test his suspicions.

“You still afraid of me, kid?”

At the sound of the questioning inflection in his tone, Nero immediately glances upwards, his expression barely clearing, and Dante can practically see the way the kid struggles to process the question, his hands fiddling anxiously in a clear tell of his emotions. After a moment, Nero jerkily shakes his head, in a motion that looks far too automatic to be genuine.

“Are you just agreeing because you think that’s what I want?”

He doesn’t mean for the question to come out so bluntly, but Nero cringes away at the bite in Dante’s tone, looking quite unsure of how to even approach the question. The kid looks like a prey animal, like he’s been caught in a trap and Dante’s the one who’s been setting it up.

Nero very tentatively shakes his head and Dante’s breath leaves him in a sharp, frustrated exhale before he can stop it. The sound of it alone is enough to shift the atmosphere completely, and whatever defenses Nero had been starting to lower slam back upwards.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have…”

The kid’s gaze shifts slightly to Dante’s right, then his left, which is all the warning that Dante gets before Nero makes a break for it, darting past Dante’s side in a motion that reminds Dante of exactly how inhumanely fast the kid is. 

“Shit, wait--!”

Nero scrambles towards the top of the stairs, his form wobbling precariously over the ledge. Logically, Dante knows that the kid’s more than capable of making his way up and down the stairs by himself, but he isn’t exactly thinking rationally at the moment, his blood running fast and frantic in his veins. His instinct flares up before the rest of his body can catch up, and he lunges forward towards the kid, easily grabbing Nero and pulling him away from the hazard. 

The kid struggles against him violently, his tiny form thrashing frantically as Dante wraps his arm around Nero’s waist and brings him closer to his chest, and Dante feels like they’ve gone back to their first meeting with how out of control Nero is. He doesn’t want to hurt the kid or trap him here, but he can’t let Nero run off like this either, in this kind of blindingly panicked emotional state, and he somehow wishes Vergil was here, his brother apparently much better at handling Nero’s panic than Dante is.

His grip on the kid is looser than it should be, tempered by his concern of hurting him, but somehow, he doesn't feel like Nero is trying very hard to get away from him at all. He knows firsthand how strong Nero really is, what actually lies underneath his tiny and frail appearance. 

When Dante chances a proper look at the kid, Nero isn't pushing him away so much as he is pushing at him, putting an actual amount of force behind his little shoves. Dante doesn't understand what the kid's hoping to get at, but before he can work it out, Nero twists his head to the side.

Only Dante’s own superhuman reflexes allow him to yank his hand out of the way fast enough for Nero’s teeth to clamp down on empty air. 

Dante actually pauses then, in part because of the way that the kid is looking at him, something stubborn and determined in his eyes as he glares Dante, but mostly because it’s so out-of-place for the peace-loving kid he’s come to know. Nero’s still blinking at him in that awfully expectant way, and Dante’s never felt more out of place than he does now, so far away from understanding what Nero wants.

He automatically releases the kid, maneuvering himself so that he’s sitting in front of the stairs just in case, blocking off the route.

Nero jerks in surprise at the sudden absence of Dante’s grip, stumbling backwards onto the floor and staring back at him wide, frightened eyes, his form heaving with shallow, too-quick breaths. Dante thinks that the kid might start gathering himself for another escape attempt, but Nero stays oddly still, the fight leaving his body as quickly as it had come, and Dante takes advantage of the opportunity that Nero’s hesitation affords him.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he reaffirms again, holding his hands out in a placating gesture, feeling his own heart pound uncomfortably against his chest. He hardly knows if this is the right thing to do, if maybe his brother or his mother or father would handle this situation a different way, but this is the only way that  _ Dante  _ knows how to do things. 

“But I can’t let you run off, either. You’re gonna get yourself hurt. Maybe it was too soon to make you come out, and maybe there’s just a whole lot of shit going on with you that I don’t understand. So if you want to go back in that room and lock yourself in, you can. I won’t follow you.”

His words hang in the air for a moment, but Dante can see the way they work this time, how Nero slowly processes them. The kid’s rapid breathing escalates another level, and Dante’s just starting to seriously consider dragging Vergil’s ass back here for some emergency intervention when Nero brings his hands to his face and falls slightly backwards, sitting against the floor with a muted thump.

The kid doesn’t move from his spot as he curls in on himself, his shoulders starting to tremble as Nero begins to properly cry in that disturbingly soundless way of his, his involuntary hiccups swallowed up into the silence. 

If it were Dante in his place, five-years-old and terrified out of his mind, he thinks that this would be the part where he’d look to his mother for comfort, where he’d want her to wrap him up in his arms and run her hands through his hair and whisper reassurances. But Dante doesn’t know what  _ Nero  _ wants, doesn’t know what he thinks or needs, and their inability to communicate these things with each other is what this entire problem hinges on, really.

He leans his head back, his heart sinking somewhere into the pit of his stomach as Nero continues to cry, the kid feebly wrapping his tiny arms around himself. It’s somehow more painful to watch now, compared to the first time they’d met like this, because now he’s seen what Nero looks like when he smiles, the way his face lights up and his eyes brighten with a level of impossibly pure happiness that someone in his situation shouldn’t even possess. 

Nero’s had a lot of good days, days where he can smile freely like that, and somewhere along the row of good days, one after another, Dante had forgotten what it meant for Nero to be sad.

He shifts slowly in place, readjusting himself so that he’s also sitting more comfortably against the floor, leaning slightly forward, studying the kid for an opening. The fact that Nero’s still in front of him at all is a good sign, a small positive that Dante can pick out from the rest of this scenario, because if Nero really didn’t want to see him, he’d have shut himself up in the bedroom by now. 

Nero’s shaking dies down after a few minutes, and when the spaces between his full-body tremors stretch out for long enough for the kid to get his breathing back under control, Dante decides to try again.

“You mind if I come closer?”

The answering shudder isn’t exactly a response, but the grip Nero’s got around himself loosens up by a fraction of an inch. Dante deliberately allows the metal parts of his coat to drag against the ground as he moves slightly forward, making enough noise to let the kid know what he’s doing.

Nero doesn’t move away, even when Dante comes up right in front of him, and Dante feels an uncomfortable amount of adrenaline pushing through his veins, his muscles cramping against the way he’s trying to restrain his own motions.

“So...I think we’re maybe not getting each other right now. But if we’re gonna get anywhere, you have to be honest with me, kid. I know I’m pretty great, but I can’t always tell what’s up with you. Sometimes you have to help me out a bit.”

Slowly, Nero pulls away from himself, dropping his arms at his sides as he hesitantly peeks up at Dante, and Dante’s relieved to find that the kid’s making eye contact with him again, at the very least. There’s something like genuine comprehension in Nero’s gaze now, the fear of whatever he’d been expecting taking a backseat to his willingness to listen.

“Okay, so here’s the deal. I came up here thinking you were afraid of me because of what I did and looked like. And that maybe you were a little mad, too, because I’m supposed to keep you safe and I didn’t.”

He watches Nero closely as he speaks, but the boy really only reacts to the second part of his sentence, shaking his head in genuine denial of that part of the claim. As far as he can tell, Nero’s body language backs it up--the kid isn’t angry with him for what he’s done.

Then Nero tilts his head slightly, biting his lip in hesitation before pointing questioningly at Dante, and something like a slow realization slides into place. He thinks on the way that Nero had flinched away from him at first, the dull look of resignation and expectancy hanging in his eyes, and the layer of sudden calm that Nero’s now fallen into, after Dante’s already gone and made a scene.

“You thought  _ I  _ was angry with  _ you?” _

His slightly incredulous question earns him another nod, this time slightly more certain, like Nero can hardly comprehend the alternative. 

“So, what, you were thinking I’d punish you?”

Dante’s slowly starting to put the pieces together, working out the way that Nero thinks. The kid’s been raised in a completely different manner, on violence and neglect and not much else, and if he’d believed so deeply that Dante was going to act out against him, then he’d probably gotten tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop and had decided to force it.

He’d caught Nero off-guard with his talk-first approach, because apparently no one in this kid’s life has ever tried something like it before, and with what little control Nero had had over the situation, he’d done his best to bring things back to the way he was used to.

Dante drops his head with a soft sigh, his chest clenching unpleasantly at the thought, and something in the noise makes Nero look curiously at him, blinking steadily at him. There’s no resistance left in the kid’s form now that Nero thinks he’s been properly punished, which is just another layer on top of everything else.

He and Vergil are going to have to fix this, somehow, but this kind of mindset isn’t something that they can change so quickly, with just their words.

He’ll go for the temporary solution, then.

“Well, I’m not mad you. I was mostly upset with myself, kid. You and I have been getting pretty close here, and I thought I’d gone and fucked that up. Don’t really think I have any reason to be mad at you, anyway.”

Nero casts him a dubious look, before bringing his trembling hand to his mouth and biting gently at the skin between his thumb and index finger. It isn’t a hard bite, isn’t enough to leave a mark or draw blood, and it isn’t a nervous gesture either, more of a silent attempt at communication than anything.

“You’re thinking about that bastard? I mean, yeah, you bit him, but…he had it coming, honestly. Who cares if that piece of shit spills a few drops of blood? Could stand to lose a little more, if you ask me.”

Evidently,  _ Nero  _ cares, because the kid’s stare grows somewhat plaintive as Nero practically wilts from the shame written across his face, and it occurs to Dante that Nero’s somehow found it in his too-soft heart to worry over a stranger who’d hit him. The thought is oddly heartwarming and bitterly sad, and Dante can’t stop the way he instinctively reaches out then, his hand dropping gently against the top of Nero’s head.

He realizes what he’s done a second later, but other than a slight tensing underneath his palm, Nero doesn’t flinch away, much less afraid of his touch without the expectation of punishment behind it.

“Don’t worry about him or what you did, Nero. He’s alright, I swear. You didn’t do anything bad.”

At the feeling of Dante’s hand against his head, something in the kid’s expression crumbles, his bottom lip starting to wobble as he blinks hard at Dante from beneath his lashes. Dante offers Nero a tentative sort of smile, then, an unspoken invitation that Nero freely takes, ducking out from under Dante’s hand and going directly towards him, burying his face in Dante’s chest.

Nero’s tears seep through his shirt and into his skin, the kid’s fluffy locks fluttering against the fabric of Dante’s clothing when Dante shifts to make them more comfortable, wrapping one of his arms securely around the boy’s body. His chest feels oddly warm, like an ice cube is melting somewhere inside of him, a gentle heat leaking into his veins and pooling in his stomach.

“Aw, hey, it’s okay. You’ll be okay, kid,” Dante murmurs, patting gently at the back of Nero’s head, unable to help the way that his smile widens and softens at the edges. 

He keeps his hold on Nero fairly loose, leaving the kid room to pull away whenever he wants to, but Nero seems content to stay pressed up against him for long enough that Dante feels his back start to ache at the awkward position. He clears his throat lightly, trying not to disturb Nero as he very slowly shuffles towards the nearest hard surface to lean up against.

Dante’s more than half-expecting the kid to fall asleep on him, given the kind of day he’s had, but Nero’s got more stamina than he thought, eventually wiggling his way backwards and out of Dante’s arms, swiping hastily at his eyes.

Dante straightens up, stretching out the stiff muscles in his back as Nero gives him a lost sort of look, a faint pink flush creeping over his cheeks as he ducks his head in something like embarrassment now that the emotion behind his outburst has disappeared. He can definitely sympathize with the kid here, so he gets to his feet quickly, slipping easily into his casual attitude to move things along.

“Alright--so, you hungry? Vergil won’t be back for a while, he went out on a walk or something. Don’t mind him too much.”

He’s telling that last part both to himself and the kid, because he’s still a little split on his decision to let Vergil go off on his own. His brother isn’t always predictable, and he’d made his intentions clear when he’d left the house, but in the end, Nero had taken priority over his nineteen-year-old twin who was more than capable of looking after himself.

He isn’t in charge of Vergil, anyway, never really has been, and if he wants to continue to attempt to get along with his brother, he figures that letting him to his own devices and trusting his brother’s own judgment is one of the best ways to start. 

Nero perks up at the mention of food, probably because the kid hasn’t eaten all day. He’d refused to eat anything at breakfast, too nervous about the doctor’s visit to get something in him, and neither Dante or Vergil had wanted to force it.

“Yeah, me too. I’ll get us a pizza.”

The boy’s gaze turns a little pleading, the corners of his lips turning down and his cheeks puffing out in something suspiciously close to a pout as his hands wring at the end of his shirt.

“Fine, you can keep eating that cereal of yours.  _ I’m _ going to enjoy myself.”

He steps towards the stairs, expecting Nero to follow him, but before he can actually go down, there’s a slight tug at the end of his coat. He glances downwards to find Nero peeking shyly up at him, his expression caught between nervous and hopeful as he tentatively holds his small arms up and out to Dante, tilting his head in a half-request, half-plea.

It’s a familiar gesture, and the clearest expression of trust that Nero can give, and Dante actually chuckles as he bends down to pick Nero up in his arms, feeling the way that Nero immediately snuggles into his hold.

“Good to have you back,” Dante says, almost surprised at the fondness in his own tone, and it’s a little absurd how happy Nero’s nonverbal reacceptance is able to make him.

It’s probably a sign that he’s really getting in too deep with this kid, but he honestly doesn’t think it could be any other way. He gently ruffles Nero’s fluffy hair with a hand, bringing the both of them downstairs.

Nero’s still too short to properly sit at the kitchen table without help, and Dante’s feeling a little too lazy to stack up the pillows like he normally does, so he instead turns his attention to the overturned couch. He shifts Nero to his left arm and easily rights the furniture with his free hand, his demonic strength rather useful for home decoration purposes.

The kid looks duly impressed at this, his wide-eyed gaze turning somewhat even more awestruck as he peers up at Dante, who picks up one of the many fallen couch cushions and drops it somewhat haphazardly into the empty space, so that Nero at least has a place to sit. He’s about to properly deposit Nero onto it when he feels tiny, insistent little tug on one of the folds of his coat.

“What’s up, kid?” he asks, which is an immediate mistake, because Nero wiggles slightly upwards and points indicatively at the rest of the mess around them, apparently imploring Dante to restore the order.

Dante grimaces, deliberately averting his eyes to avoid the incredibly persuasive power of Nero’s pleading gaze.

“Yeah, here’s the thing--we don’t have to worry about that. That’s what we have Vergil for, right?”

His brother, of course, would sooner mop the floor with Dante’s face than do it for him, but Dante’s never been spectacularly good at going above and beyond when it comes to trivial shit like this. He’d mostly been planning to leave the living room the way it was, until the mess actually presented itself as a problem for him.

Before Nero can protest, Dante settles him onto the only safe part of the couch, giving the kid another quick head pat before going to grab his stuff. At this point, he’s all but mastered Nero’s preferred cereal-to-milk ratio, surrounding the mountain of marshmallows with an unjustifiably minuscule layer of milk.

Nero’s still looking a little grumpy at Dante’s refusal to clean by the time he returns, but when Dante presents his tribute of Kwazy Kwispies to the boy, his pout instantly disappears, replaced by another one of his kind, enthusiastic little smiles. The bowl is apparently enough to tide him over, all thoughts of cleaning instantly forgotten as Nero eagerly takes it from him.

“So...we good?” Dante asks, after Nero’s already shoved three spoonfuls worth of cereal into his mouth, and the questioning way that Nero looks up at him, his cheeks stuffed with cereal, makes it fairly impossible not to smile. “Things between us feel okay?”

Nero chews so hurriedly that Dante’s a little afraid that the kid might choke, swallowing down his food as quickly as possible in order to give Dante a vigorous nod. Then, like he’s afraid that his gesture might not be enough to convey his point, he plucks an especially brightly colored marshmallow off of the very top of his cereal and holds it out to Dante.

Dante’s got absolutely no intention of waging war on his internal organs with it, but he accepts the present from Nero anyway. 

“I get it--you can keep the rest. Trust me, this is enough.”

Nero does indeed seem to trust him, looking pleased with himself as he settles back into the cushions and properly tucks into his cereal as Dante goes to order his pizza. 

He’s in the middle of listing out his regular order to his regular place when a hint of movement catches his eye. Out of curiosity, he turns his attention to it, his brain going on autopilot and keeping up the conversation as he leans across the desk to watch the kid.

Nero’s gently balanced his empty bowl and spoon on the space he’d been sitting on, his arms instead full with the single cushion he’s picked up off of the floor. The kid is so tiny that he can’t even see over the top of it, wobbling over to the couch where he makes several failed attempts to push the cushion into his original position.

“Uh, yeah,” Dante cuts off the guy on the other end of the line. “Large pizza, all the toppings, no olives, fifteen bucks, it’ll be here in twenty minutes, I got it, bye.” 

It’s not the first time that Dante’s hung up in the middle of an order in favor of solving a crisis, so he doubts that his abrupt ending will affect the quality of his pizza. 

Nero looks surprised when Dante kneels down next to him, twisting slightly around to look at him, still hugging the cushion unsteadily to his chest. He doesn’t protest, though, when Dante reaches over to tug it out of his hands, easily sliding it into place on the couch.

“Guess I can’t let you have all the fun here, yeah?” he concedes, because propping his feet up on his desk and eating his pizza while watching a five-year-old kid try and clean up his office for him is a level of asshole that even Dante and Vergil combined haven’t really reached.

The kid levels him with such a proud gaze that Dante can’t even find it in himself to complain about having to clean up, however jokingly. 

“You’re real talented, you know that? Pretty much impossible to say no to you.”

Nero dissolves into a silent, shy giggle at that, a pleased little flush dusting his cheeks as he ducks his head and hides his face, as unused to receiving praise as usual. 

Even with Dante getting his ass into gear, Nero’s still determined to help him, waddling loyally after him to whichever part of the shop Dante’s working on, right up until Dante turns his back for a little too long and comes to find the kid peacefully curled up on the ground, completely dead to the world.

Well. That’s a talent too, he supposes.

 

* * *

 

“Dante.”

Dante isn’t sure what time it is when he awakens to find Vergil looming over him, a slight frown on his otherwise neutral face. His mouth feels painfully dry and the inside of his head is actively attempting to resemble stuffed cotton, but he manages a lazy grin at his twin anyway, offering him a casual little wave.

“So where have  _ you  _ been?” he drawls, trying to sound largely uninterested as his gaze sharpens and he studies his brother more carefully.

Vergil looks immaculate as ever, for the most part, his clothes unstained and starched, his hair carefully styled into its usual position, and nothing about him suggests that he’d engaged in any sort of struggle. The Yamato is nowhere to be seen, its presence replaced by an unusually large brown paper shopping bag.

Dante squints, trying to tilt his head to peek at the contents, but Vergil unsubtly shifts the bag behind him, his expression growing more unreadable by the second.

“Out,” Vergil replies, as wonderfully open and helpful as always.

He leans his head back onto the couch cushions with a barely repressed groan, dragging his hand down his face before forcing himself to sit up. He isn’t too sure what his brother’s got in store for him yet, but it probably requires his full attention anyway.

“Where is Nero?”

There’s the slightest of pauses before Vergil says the kid’s name, a bare hint of hesitation which doesn’t surprise Dante as much as he’d thought it would.

“The kid’s sleeping upstairs. We got to talk for a bit, worked some things out, and then he fell asleep. He’s had a long day.”

He’s already looking around by the end of his sentence, trying to glance outside to ascertain what time it is. The sun’s long gone, and the only light filtering in from the windows comes from the dim glare of the streetlights, meaning that it’s at least past midnight.

So Vergil’s been gone for over half a day--a somewhat disquieting fact to wake up to, even if his brother weren’t holding a lumpy-looking bag of mysterious repute.

“You talked? Then...does he know what we are?”

“Was kinda hoping you’d be able to help with that, actually. Seems to me like you understand our demon side better than I do. You’ve had it for longer, anyway.”

Vergil nods curtly, and Dante can’t quite determine if it’s a gesture of concession or agreement. He doesn’t continue on, though, leaving a few seconds of silence as Dante internally debates the merits of asking Vergil, in no uncertain terms, what he’d ended up doing with that human.

Before he can actually go and potentially fuck up the already precarious balance of the situation, Vergil’s gaze suddenly shifts upwards, his eyes softening in a way that Dante’s come to realize is exclusive to Nero. He doesn’t even have to look behind him to know that the kid’s up, a suspicion that is confirmed by the sound of muted footsteps against the stairs.

After a moment, Nero resurfaces on the downstairs level, hurrying towards Vergil at top speed with his arms outstretched. He wastes no time at all in wrapping his arms around the highest part of Vergil he can reach, pressing his face into Vergil’s knees as he nuzzles up against him.

“Hello, Nero,” Vergil greets softly, his voice gentle and lined with hidden kindness.

Nero tilts his head up to give Vergil an adoring sort of look, which is when Vergil decides to make his move, lifting up the shopping bag and extracting an enormously round stuffed cat from its depths.

The kid startles at the sight of it, jerking slightly backwards as he examines it with a deeply perplexed look on his face, an expression that’s probably reflected on Dante’s own face. He immediately glances at his brother, but Vergil has his head slightly turned away from Dante, an embarrassed set to the tightness of his jaw.

“This is for you.”

Vergil’s clarification comes out rather stiffly as he leans down and sets the cat plushie on the floor, right next to Nero.

The boy gives it a bewildered look, inching slightly away from it in surprise as he leans away from it, his hands held uncertainly to his chest. Now that the two are on the same level, Dante can see that the cat’s almost the same size as Nero, if not bigger, its smiling face beaming contently back at the kid.

“Holy fuck,” Dante mutters under his breath, drawing Vergil’s attention in a sharp, unsubtle side glance in his direction. “What the hell did you do, trade four hundred ramen packets for it?”

He probably deserves the look of silent disdain that Vergil gives him in response, but he can’t help the grin that’s spreading across his face, partially fueled by the relief fluttering in the pit of his stomach. He’s honestly pretty shocked that this is what Vergil chose to do in the time he’d been away, because he never took his brother as a stuffed animals kind of guy. 

The two of them had never been particularly invested in toys after a point, the entertainment they provided paling in comparison to the new and shiny discovery of sparring, of working out the conflicts that their demonic instincts afforded them in the real, physical way. Even before then, Vergil’s focus had mostly been on his books, his brother patient and quiet enough to be truly interested in  them.

So it’s perhaps this, amongst many other things, that makes it difficult for Dante to imagine Vergil’s process in procuring this. His brother had maybe stalked out of the shop and past a store, and the enormity of this cat plushie perhaps caught his eye, but after that, he finds it a little hard to picture Vergil abandoning his original goal in favor of walking in and buying this thing.

Nero looks between the two of them tentatively, remaining frozen to his spot, and Dante figures that the kid maybe needs a little encouragement with this. He leans forward where he is, bracing one of his hands against his thighs and motioning towards the plushie with the other.

“You heard him. It’s all yours--go wild, kid.”

Nero goes about as wild as one would expect, creeping slowly forward in that mute way of his. With curious eye, he steps carefully to the side, looking rather shocked to discover that the cat’s roundness extends all the way around its body. He moves in a slow circle around it, pausing when he gets to the cat’s fluffy little tail, and Dante sees the way that Nero’s hand twitches at his side, like he wants to touch it, but evidently thinks better of it.

After he finishes his cursory examination, he looks up at Vergil again, before tilting his head to the side and pointing at himself questioningly.

“Yes, Nero. It is indeed yours.”

Nero fully turns his attention to the stuffed cat, then, giving it a tiny little wave before he closes the distance between them properly, pressing one hand against the cat’s squishy body. He perks up at the way that the stuffing yields underneath his touch, retracting and replacing his hand several times in a row as he gets used to the feeling of the softness underneath his hand.

Dante isn’t sure whether he should let the kid explore more on his own or give him another push, but when Nero twists around to give him a helpless sort of look, Dante can’t resist. He plops himself right down on the floor next to Nero and the cat, reaching around and gently curving his hand against the back of it.

“Here--it’s meant for hugging. So...kind of like this…” he brings the thing closer, waiting as Nero very hesitantly opens up his arms to receive it, his eyes widening as the cat’s fluffy body makes contact with his own.

Nero stays perfectly still for a moment, blinking slowly as he processes the situation, and then the kid wraps his arms all the way around it, burying his face into the gray, velvety body in a happy little motion. The kid’s smiling so hard that he nearly trembles with the force of it, his eyes squeezed shut as he nestles into the fluffy thing, and Dante feels like he’s about to explode from the amount of high-pressure heat swelling up in his chest.

“Oh my god,” he mutters, because his feelings have to come out somehow, and there’s a slight rustle of cloth beside him as Vergil sits next to them.

There’s a mixture of open relief on Vergil’s face, somewhere underneath the rare softness flooding his features, and when Dante studies the gentle cut of his brother’s expression, he somehow doesn’t find it too out of place that Vergil had gone and done this. 

“I remembered the bread,” Vergil announces without preamble, when he notices Dante looking at him for a little too long.

At this point, Nero seems to have all but forgotten about their presence, busying himself with dragging the stuffed cat around the shop, evidently intent on showing it the various parts of the place. The cat is so large that Nero actually has to push it across the floor instead of picking it up, which means that Dante’s at least getting his floor swept, but it’s a ridiculously cute sight in its own right.

“From when we went to the store. Nero has a habit of hugging things, so...I assumed he would like this.”

“Well, you were right. Good to see him so happy again. He was pretty upset earlier.”

Vergil stiffens at the mention, the barest hint of upset bleeding into his features. It’s so brief, so barely there that Dante only recognizes it on the basis of having seen it before, mirrored on his own face. 

Maybe it’s because he knows how it feels, to have guilt tugging at his stomach and weighing at his heart, or maybe because watching Nero play with his new friend has just made him unusually soft. Whatever the reason, Dante reaches out for his brother, dropping a hand against Vergil’s shoulder before he can think better of it.

It’s the first time he’s actually reached out to touch his brother in the weeks since they’d restarted their cohabitation, and Vergil feels like a stranger underneath his own palm, a thought that tastes oddly bitter in his throat. He can’t help but remember the way things used to be, how they’d pushed and shoved and prodded at each other as children with such casual freedom.

He hadn’t ever thought, back then, that he’d one day find it awkward to even pat Vergil on the back.

Vergil must be compromised too, because he doesn’t move away. He remains tense and on guard against Dante’s hand, but when he affords Dante a glance out of the corner of his eye, Dante can tell that he isn’t exactly unhappy about this new development, either.

“Don’t feel bad, Verge,” he says, mostly to have something to say at all, hastily verbalizing his reason behind the contact. “We did what we had to do. Kid’s not afraid of us anyway, apparently--we already got that part sorted out.”

His brother doesn’t look particularly optimistic, his eyes trained on where Nero is hastily pushing his stuffed cat into the kitchen. Dante has a very delayed response to what the kid is trying to do, standing upwards abruptly and grabbing the milk and cereal off of the counter before Nero can hurt himself trying to get them.

“Uh…” 

Nero’s looking at him expectantly from behind the cat, eyeing the box in Dante’s hand with no small measure of hope, and Dante just can’t bring himself to crush the kid’s dreams of sharing his cereal with his inanimate plushie. 

“Sure, here you go,” he obliges, feeling Vergil’s incredulous stare burning its way into the back of his head as Dante shakes out a fresh bowl of cereal, placing it gently on the floor in front of Nero.

“That is a waste of precious material,” Vergil mutters quietly underneath his breath, something in his gaze almost envious as he watches Nero press a dry handful of cereal against the sewn-in sideways “3” that the cat’s got for a mouth. 

“What, you wish you were that cat? Wouldn’t be the first time.”

He feels Vergil’s demonic aura spark sharply upwards as he glares hard at Dante, but for all his usual composure, he isn’t quite able to hide the embarrassment creeping up his face.

“You swore you would never speak of that incident again. Those seven days extra ice cream obviously meant nothing to you and your compromised morals.”

Despite the deadly rays of indignance Vergil is sending in his direction, Dante breathes out a laugh, leaning against the edge of the couch for support. Vergil copies his motion a second later, his gaze drifting to the broken, burnt part of the floorboards sticking out rather obviously in the middle of the room.

“Perhaps he will not be so eager to engage with us, once we actually explain what we are.”

Dante winces at the reminder, mostly because, as fucked-up as it is, he’d honestly been banking on Nero’s previous trauma to numb him to the surprise and potential horror of living with two demon hybrids. Seeing the smile on Nero’s face now makes it easy enough for him to pretend, but a part of him knows that Vergil might be right.

He shrugs with practiced care, playing it off like it doesn’t matter to him, like he hasn’t been thinking about it ever since he’d made the mistake of triggering in front of Nero in the first place.

“Maybe. But it’s Nero--you never know. Kid’s full of surprises.”

Vergil makes a neutral sounding hum of agreement, drawing one of his knees up to his chest and leaving the other extended in front of him, a heavy enough pause hanging between them that Dante thinks his brother might want to speak. He tilts his head towards him in indication, in a subtle enough gesture that Vergil can turn the invitation down if he wants, can pretend not to notice.

“I will admit, I was expecting considerably more...resistance when I returned. From Nero, I mean.”

“What, you thought he’d hate you too? You’re not the one who was sitting right next to him when it happened.”

“Indeed, I was not. And perhaps that makes it worse, in my estimation.”

Dante waits patiently for Vergil to continue, noting the weight in his brother’s swallows, the rigidity in his jaw despite his overall relaxed posture. The barely-there half-smile that had creeping across his face from when he’d been watching Nero is gone, and even though Vergil’s gaze is still locked on Nero, it isn’t quite following him, seeing something else further away.

Then Vergil’s attention slides slowly towards him, an unreadable tightness crossing his face as he looks at Dante’s face, then at the amulet still hanging loosely around his neck.

“It was...unpleasant to find myself ill-suited to raise and to protect Nero.”

There’s another layer lurking underneath his words, one that Dante cannot find the energy within himself to pursue, so he merely tilts his head back, a dry, somewhat humorless smile tugging at his mouth.

“Funny. I was just thinking the same thing, earlier. So maybe we are doing a shit job at this--but it’s sure as hell better than whoever had Nero before. And I don’t think he’s got anywhere to go. He might as well stick with us, I think, until he doesn’t want to anymore.”

Vergil exhales slowly, seeming to deflate against the edge of the couch, and Dante eyes his brother, a mixture of exasperation and something warm bubbling up in his throat.

“This why you stayed out for so long? You just sat out there by yourself and thought about this?”

His brother doesn’t quite answer, unable or unwilling to admit to it, but from the looks of it, the way that Vergil seems a little less weighed down, Dante suspects that he’s hit the nail on the head.

He leans towards Vergil, daring to nudge him in the side, and the motion startles his twin slightly, Vergil’s gaze snapping directly towards his face.

“Next time, stick around--a pity party’s more fun the more people you’ve got.”

It’s an open invitation, one that his brother doesn’t even have to acknowledge, but after the initial moment of surprise, a wry, almost-amused look passes over Vergil’s face. Vergil bows his head slightly, the edges of his mouth softening into something slightly more emotive than usual.

“I doubt the validity of that. But perhaps there is merit in seeing watching you sulk.”

“That’s terrible,” Dante declares, his voice caught somewhere between a laugh and an offended noise.

Vergil looks quite ready to retort, but Nero seems to have finally completed his little tour of the home, and is now pushing the cat back over to them, the bowl of cereal looking suspiciously and empty in his hands. 

The two of them automatically sit up as the kid comes closer, stopping in front of him and pausing for a moment to regain his composure, recovering from his apparently arduous journey. He places the bowl gently on the ground before he straightens up, keeping one hand against his cat and the other pressed to his mouth as he looks between Dante and Vergil.

Some kind of inspiration seems to strike him, then, because he perks up with sudden energy, crouching down slightly before trying to take the entire stuffed cat into his arms. It isn’t a largely successful attempt, with the thing hovering maybe a centimeter or two off of the ground, but after a few aborted steps towards Vergil, Nero manages to get up and close to him, dropping the round thing onto Vergil’s lap.

“What,” Vergil says flatly, looking equal parts so completely surprised and carefully blank that Dante has to laugh.

Nero nods enthusiastically, giving the cat another nudge so that it flops face-first into Vergil’s chest. It’s so obvious what Nero wants--the boy’s hope is written so clearly across his face that even Vergil can’t pretend to ignore him, especially when the kid starts looking indicatively at Vergil’s hands, which are frozen by his sides.

“I don’t think…cat…” Vergil replies eloquently, the power of his human speech withering in comparison to the brightness of Nero’s smile. 

“Come on, Vergil. The cat wants a hug. Even you can’t ignore that.”

Vergil shoots him a dangerous glare, but Nero is starting to notice his inaction, biting uncertainly at his lip as he begins to lower his head, his foot scuffing nervously against the ground. The kid doesn’t look sad as much as he does resigned, which is about twenty times worse, and is more than enough to propel Vergil into motion.

With stiff, strangled looking movements, Vergil lifts his arms and wraps them delicately around the cat, delivering several quick, awkward pats to its back, a barely noticeable flush starting to creep up the back of his neck. Dante, for his part, makes the truly herculean effort of holding back his laughter, politely averting his eyes away from the sight and salvaging whatever dignity Vergil was attempting to retain.

Nero looks delighted at the development, beaming happily at Vergil and making pleased little fluttering motions with his hands, eventually becoming so unable to contain his own happiness that he covers his face with his hands, occasionally peeking out through his fingers at them.

When Vergil deems the hug to have gone on for a sufficiently large amount of time, he unwraps himself from the cat and tries to hand it back to Nero, who immediately shakes his head before pointing to Dante.

Oh. Of course.

“Yes, you are correct, Nero.  _ Dante  _ would like a turn, too,” Vergil replies, thrusting the stuffed cat into Dante’s chest to punctuate the sound of his name with enough force to nearly knock him over.

Dante, though, has got no problems with cuddling with the thing, and he cheerfully pulls it into a one-armed embrace, grinning at Vergil with a little too much satisfaction.

“This thing got a name?” he starts to ask Nero, who looks taken aback at the question.

The kid starts to lower his head in thought, but to Dante’s immense surprise, Vergil interrupts.

_ “She _ already has a name, Dante. This brand of cat is called Pusheen, which you would be aware of if you perhaps paid more attention.”

Something in Vergil’s voice sounds oddly indignant on behalf of this cat, and suddenly Dante isn’t so sure that Vergil’s choice in the stuffed animal was entirely random. The inherent hilarity in the situation is barely smothered by the semi-murderous look Vergil is giving him, and it’s really only this, along with the genuine wonder in Nero’s gaze that allows him to return to the cat to Nero without further incident, his laugh shoved somewhere deep into his chest.

With the cat returned to him, Nero stretches upwards to give it a gentle pat on the head, his actions disrupted by the yawn that breaks over his face. The kid starts to rub sleepily at his eyes, which is Dante’s cue to get up, scooping Nero up into one arm and the cat in the other.

“Okay, you gotta go back to bed--you can cuddle with her upstairs. Just don’t forget about me, yeah?”

Nero looks absolutely appalled at the idea, shaking his head frantically and pushing his tiny hand against Dante’s chest to reassure him, settling down only when Dante hastily reassures him that he’d been joking.

He exchanges another look with Vergil before he takes Nero up to his room, feeling his brother’s contemplative gaze against his back the entire time. 

Their discussion from earlier isn’t quite over, Dante thinks, and they’ve got a new one to open up too, when Nero’s ready for it. They’ll have to sit this innocent human kid down and drag him a little deeper into their world, and he honestly isn’t sure whether that’s better or worse for Nero, in this case.

Maybe Nero won’t understand--maybe he’ll look at what they are and only see a threat, another tool that can be used to hurt him. It’s entirely possible and an entirely rational conclusion for the boy to come to, as much as Dante would rather avoid it.

But when he lays Nero down on the bed and watches the boy sleepily cuddle up to his stuffed cat, one of his little teeth poking out from under his lip, he thinks he can at least let himself hope.

And sometimes, that’s enough.

**Author's Note:**

> https://twitter.com/moolktea  
> twitter where u will only find extremely cursed danero content


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